Office in Silverlight…I thought so!

Well, it’s been so shockingly long since I’ve been posting that I only have to go back four entries to point out a prediction I made ways-a-way back in Oct 2007:  Office will port to Silverlight (or words to that effect).

I know, scrolling 4 posts down is going to be cumbersome, so here’s a link too.

Well, it seemed obvious back then to me, and now it turns out it’s well on it’s way.  Here‘s a somewhat limited video on Channel 9, but there’s enough in there to see what’s a cookin.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/PDCNews/First-Look-Office-14-for-Web/

Big emphasis on the real-time collaboration aspects, which is the right thing to do of course.  But what’s interesting to me is in the demo they only showed editing in Excel and OneOne, not in Word.

Why?  Is this too hard to do?  The RichTextBox has not been developed for Silverlight yet (although some 3rd party ones have sprung up recently).  I assumed MS was staying clear of RichText for the same reason the browser editing control (IMO) got stunted in it’s development ascent….so that it wouldn’t compete with Word.  So, what’s going on?  Is it just that it was an early demo and they hadn’t done it yet, OR is the editing surface fundamentally too hard to replicate in Silverlight, OR are they making it a read only experience to avoid other nasty competitive issues by having that technology developed and floating around in Silverlight land?

Most important to me is that this shows large commitment my MS to Silverlight, and that it will become a dominant platform in line-of-business, enterprise app space. And, of course, that the platform is grunty enough to support some serious interaction developments.