Six factors that will decide the fate of Silverlight

Since the public release of its earliest version last year, Silverlight has been touted as Microsoft's Flash killer. This relatively new Web development platform aims to challenge Adobe's venerable Flash (and associated Flex development tools) in the online multimedia space.

Its first version was a little rough, experts say, but the beta of Silverlight 2 (released in March) shows that Microsoft could indeed have a shot at challenging Adobe Systems' hugely popular Web media platform. But adoption of Silverlight by developers or end users has yet to take off. Realistically, it's going to take more than Silverlight being able to overcome, or to simply match, the technology of Flash, according to many observers.