[EDIT – OK, now that it is April 2nd, enough heart attacks. The following is an “April Fool’s” joke. This is an odd American custom where we lie to our friends on April 1st. :)]
As many of you know, last year I got invited out with several other bloggers to Microsoft for a full day briefing, culminating in a pretty intimate one-hour meeting with Bill Gates. As I kind of expected, a couple of people spoke to me about the possibility of working for Microsoft. At the time, I politely turned them down, not being overly interested in working with Silverlight or MS products. But, I did get a free copy of Visual Studio and Expression Suite, and played around a bit. You saw some of my postings at that time, and I wasn’t too impressed overall.
However, the conversation has continued, and Silverlight 2.0 is here and really has blown me away. As much as I love the Flash community and platform, and as much as I owe it my success to date, I have to consider the long term and where the future lies in this industry. I don’t think there’s any question that Silverlight is just going to get bigger and bigger, and I’m not sure Adobe has what it takes to keep its platform going strong in the face of that.
With all that in mind, I have decided to accept a job offer. I’ll be working directly with the Expression Blend team, hopefully brining some of the great experience making capability of Flash over to the Silverlight platform. Don’t hate me. You, too, will see the light eventually.