ReadWriteHack

We've probably all worked in organizations where we've been put in charge of projects we believed in with all our hearts and half our salaries, only to see them superseded long before their time was up. We've been in Scott Guthrie's place. Until just last April the champion of Silverlight as a Web app development platform, Guthrie now finds himself in charge of Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform.

Corporate conferences each have their own heroes, and Guthrie is one of Microsoft's most-liked, including at Build 2011 in Anaheim. Not long ago when these conferences' principal products were metaphors, attendees cheered and some even begged for folks like Guthrie, Steven Sinofsky, and a while back, Bob Muglia to take the stage. (Muglia is now Juniper Networks' Executive VP for Software.) Today, it's the soft-spoken, sensible types who lead the show, at a time when the operating system itself is looking more and more like one of Ray Ozzie's "service disruptions:" bold, scalable, and metaphorical.

"My experience in talking with developers is that they want to take advantage of these form factors. You know what I'm saying? If you take something that's not really designed for it, it doesn't turn out well." This from Jason Zander, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Visual Studio, in response to a question from one of a select group of reporters yesterday on the future (some use the term "fate") of Silverlight.

That Microsoft will be releasing another round of updates to its Visual Studio applications development suite and Expression Web app development suite, should surprise absolutely no one, especially in the wake of Tuesday's momentous news. The programming platform for Windows 8 is widening to make room for a new system services provider called WinRT. It will be separate from .NET.

The Windows Runtime library (WinRT) is the principal provider of system services for applications in Windows 8 that will be designed to incorporate the new "Metro" style. Officially it is not a replacement for any part of Windows we have come to know. But it is becoming abundantly clear that use of WinRT in the way it's intended, including with Microsoft's upcoming round of developers' tools, will move Web apps developers away from Silverlight, the company's existing redistributable runtime platform.