Now, don't get me wrong, i love all the new stuff Microsoft have release this year.  Silverlight has inspired me immensly, SilverlightStreaming has amazing potential for all the new ideas people are coming up with, DeepZoom is about the most amazing and usable thing I've seen for a long time.  The question really is this : how many people that i write software for (IE the General Public) have any idea on how to use it?

Jesse Liberty just wrote an amazing post that sums up that entire concept

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/07/11/the-5-levels-of-technophilia-and-silverlight.aspx

He descibes people's technical acceptance in a set of 5 percentiles, ranging from the uber geeks to the people who still record Eastenders on a BetaMax.  The CJ team are all sitting in Percentiles 1 and 2, while the majority of the internet users are more like 3, 4 and 5

Point is : it's all very well writing stuff in the latest technology but if the target audience is in the fouth and fifth percentiles then all that technological brilliance is wasted to a certain extent as the user will only use 5% of the functionality anyway. 

Not that it will stop me writing DeepZoom based e-commerce this year of course.  People are exposed to new tchnology all the time and it become the 'norm' as more people are exposed and learn to use it to their advantage. I hear they have installed the Microsft Surface app in a Las Vegas casion so how long before we're operating meetings at a table with Surface installed?  or using a touch-screen device to operate our home devices?  That may be a long way off but things like the DeepZoom application are moving people up the Technophile Percentiles all the time, adding more aspects to the user experience and expoingthem to new ways of doing onlice activities. This is exciting for the people writing these things as we can then push our apps even further :¬)