>The sad thing is Silverlight had some potential as a niche product,... We'll probably never know because the market seems to have decided it's dead.

I am unsure on who is to blame in this debacle -
MS promised a lot for Silverlight. First tries with the Nokia implementation soured instantly,
as the starting time was even longer than the already terrible startup on windows.
Did not get even a real second round (version 3.x) to eliminate bugs and enhance perf on Symbian...

SL for Symbian dead even when Symbian was still alive, no official support for iOS and android -
MS heaped trouble on SL even before the market had a real chance to see a good product ;-)

regards

thomas