iPhone: Microsoft's Silverlight A Possibility Instead Of Flash?

With less three hours to go until Apple's (NSDQ: AAPL) SDK event, there's lots of speculation flying around on what the company has to say. One idea comes from The Seattle Times, where Ben Romano suggests that if Apple's Steve Jobs dislikes Adobe's (NSDQ: ADBE) Flash Lite so much, then Microsoft's (NSDQ: MSFT) alternative Silverlight technology is a possibility. The idea has even more legs since Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced on Tuesday that it has picked Silverlight for its Series 60, Series 40 phones and the Nokia Tablets for running rich Internet applications.

Adding to that, Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft's .NET developer division, said yesterday at the Mix conference in Las Vegas, that Microsoft's goal is to get Silverlight installed on "everything that has an SDK" regardless of whether they're using the Windows Mobile operating system. Later, Romano asked Guthrie if that meant Apple may choose Silverlight. The answer was yes, but added the announcement wasn't likely to occur at today's Cupertino event.

Guthrie told Romano: "Obviously, there's a lot of people, including people from Adobe and Microsoft, that are going to be tuning in to watch [Apple's event tomorrow] ... Ultimately Apple does control the iPhone and the experience of the iPhone, so the options of what we can do will, to some extent, be dictated by them much more than us. Certainly from our strategy perspective, we'd like to be able to run Silverlight everywhere that has any kind of marketshare."

Meanwhile, FastCompany.TV's Robert Scoble is reporting that he got word from someone saying he's seen Flash running on an iPhone in a lab "and that it's been running for quite a while and that it's not a technical issue that caused Steve Jobs to go public about not putting Adobe's Flash on the iPhone." With this theory, the reason Jobs is causing such an uproar is because he wants their PDF renderer.

Check back in for live updates from the SDK event at Apple's Town Hall in Cupertino.<.i>

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