Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter

The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google's ChromeOS, Microsoft's Silverlight 4, and salesforce's Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff's position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shootout in Y2K suggests there's more to Chatter than meets the casual social media eye.

This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft's announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there's no getting around Microsoft's aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5's progress in the video area.