You're right, I guess I should have said Marc Canter's "Director" which Flash is a dumbed down version of...But I figured that would have been too pedantic!
There's a fun interview with Marc
here.
My background at that time was very early multimedia CD-ROM titles running off single speed drives
Back to Silverlight vs Flash and the possibility of freeness. You could be right but I suspect that Microsoft (if they're smart) may go for a similar tactic that caused the demise of Netscape and just push the player out for free, user or OEM, in an attempt to force .NET as a standard along with some of their other browser technologies. I'd say that Microsoft are playing for higher stakes than Adobe here given their failure to dominate the Internet against the likes of Google and the slow uptake of Windows Mobile.
Alternatively it could be that Nokia are investing some monies in hope that this will establish credible competition for Adobe in that space although this flies in the face of Nokia current strategy for open source technology on their Internet Tablets and keeping the OS costs/overhead low.
Or it could be a combination, Adobe have been greedy in my opinion and greed creates opportunities for new players.
Then there's always AJAX
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