Should Google be nervous about Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia display technology?One prominent blogger and former Microsoft official says so. “Google is going to have to react to this because Microsoft could use Silverlight to build more interesting services than Google has,” said Robert Scoble, vice president of media development at Podtech.net, in an interview on Wednesday morning. He authors the Scobleizer blog and was an evangelist at Microsoft until departing last July. Silverlight is a browser plug-in technology for displaying highly functional multimedia applications. With Silverlight, Microsoft theoretically could compete with Google by launching a video service to compete with Google-owned YouTube, Scoble said. Or, Google’s maps application may face competition, he said. “Google is limiting itself with mostly HTML with a little bit of Flash,” Scoble said.Google offered this response: “We always welcome innovation because it leads to a better Internet experience for everyone,” a company representative said in a prepared statement. A Microsoft official sidestepped the question of whether Microsoft planned to compete with Google with Silverlight. “It’s sort of myopic to look at one specific company in regard to Silverlight,” said Keith Smith, group product manager for the user experience platform and tools team at Microsoft. “Our intention is to deliver value to our customers,” Smith said.Meanwhile, the Common Language Runtime (CLR) unveiled at Mix07 as part of the Silverlight 1.1 alpha release is multiplatform, supporting both Windows and Macintosh, Smith noted. This marks the first time the CLR has been made cross-platform, he said. Intended for programming with Silverlight, the CLR actually is a subset of the full breadth of CLR technologies. It lacks capabilities such as code access security pieces, which are not needed since a Silverlight plugin already runs in protected sandbox, said Smith.The CLR provides low-level services such as a Just-in-Time compiler, garbage collection and security. Developers programming with the CLR can use the same programming models and skills across both platforms. Silverlight 1.1 can be accessed as a binary installation here. Software Development