I thought this video was an interesting indication of how important Flash is for web browsing.  Microsoft Program Managers and Product Managers talk about how cool it is to have Flash in the browser for a full web experience, and full screen mode for better viewing of media.

and I quote: “Does anybody have a preference of which site to visit, preferably with Flash?”

Notice the glaring lack of Silverlight and the question dodge, it seems quite obvious that they’ve suffered a hit to their release schedule and are trying to stay quiet.  If we remember that last year there were on device demos, tooling walk throughs etc.. yet now, nothing.

Ensuring that Silverlight works well on a wide range of devices is going to be a 5 year investment.  If they want to make Silverlight work across platforms then the lesson is to aim very very low.  Flash technology (in fact Mobile Client from my previous post) can run on an ARM7 @ 100mhz, which looks something like this:

By the way, for my Nokia readers, the 1600 is a great device