Since I’m often more than happy to diss Microsoft products for being poorly designed, buggy, and otherwise painful to use, I thought it only fair to admit it: judging by NBC’s implementation, the Silverlight web plugin is pretty good.

Like everyone, this is now on my radar because of the Olympics. I finally tried it tonight because it doesn’t run on PPC Macs, and I only got my new MacBook (thanks, Hunter College!) on Tuesday. I’m still a big enough geek that the first major installs were all work related–Office, SPSS, and EndNote. EndNote X1 is MUCH better than 7 but still not great; if paying myself, I would buy Sente–and I still might–but Hunter has a site license for EndNote. But I digress…

Anyway, I’ve had a good day with MS products. The Olympics online look really good. The controls actually work (except during commercials). Neat way to experience the Olympics highlights. Not that it compares to TiVo, which we got just in time to save the (amazing) opening ceremonies. But for a web plugin, Silverlight is damned good.

NBC also invested quite substantially in a high-quality end user experience. The quality of the streaming video really is remarkable–still web video, but getting closer to TV, to say the least. For tonight, at least, I’ve enjoyed the ride toward Zittrain’s Future of the Internet.

To gain an appreciation of how good it looks, check out some of the archival footage from previous olympics. Even compared to 2004, the HD video for this year’s footage looks remarkably better. Even compared to this year’s commercials, it looks really good. The commercials look like they were re-encoded from an analog stream in comparison.

My one complaint is that NBC makes you enter a ZIP code and cable provider in order to honor their (least-exclusive-arrangement-ever) deals with most cable providers not to eat too much of their audience. If your provider/ZIP combination isn’t on their list, you have to Google around to figure out who is. But then, you can just lie, and they don’t care. (Not that I learned this because I live in a building that includes cable and broadband service provided by a niche company… I would never lie to a web interface.) Pretty silly if you ask me.

Speaking of technological satisfaction: Hunter’s IT department is amazing. Super efficient, friendly, and doing it all with what surely must be a small budget relative to the size of the student and faculty population they serve.