Simon’s Blog

Microsoft has just released a product called Popfly; right now, it’s an invitation-only alpha release (see the web-site). What is Popfly? It’s an easy-to-use software tool that lets pretty much anyone create simple Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and simple video games quickly and easily. And, by “anyone”, I mean that even people that aren’t software developers or web developers. If you’re a developer, you can actually build pretty powerful apps with Popfly by writing code (although, there is a limit to the complexity of the app you’re going to want to build with Popfly); however, even if you can’t write any code at all, you can still produce simple RIAs and games just by dragging and dropping and selecting a few options interactively.

What’s particularly smart about all this is that it uses Microsoft’s brand new rich browser applications platform, Silverlight. In order for Silverlight to be a success, people need to build applications that use it. What Popfly does is give tens (maybe even hundreds) of millions of people the opportunity to create computer systems that use Silverlight; and more than that, the barrier to building a Silverlight app with Popfly is super-low. If Microsoft creates a few more of these kind of easy-to-use products, Silverlight will soon become as ubiquitous Flash on the web. As I say, a really smart move…