You! Want! Silverlight!

when i was just about to download something from microsoft, they told me that they had chosen me randomly to use and test their new Download Center Beta! i immediately felt very special and agreed to try that one instead of the usual download center.

the first thing the new site asked me to do was to execute Step 1: Install Silverlight, which amazed me. there was some lame language about how that would improve my experience as a download-oriented customer they wanted to make very happy, but why on earth would i need some sophisticated client-side runtime environment for just downloading files? i will never know, because i am determined to keep my computer a Silverlight- and AIR-free zone.

and btw, what i was downloading was the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, which turned out be a paltry 27.5mb download. what are you guys doing? shipping a complete office 2007 which silently opens and saves the files that have to be converted? it is interesting to see how easy it apparently is to implement the 6'000 pages of OOXML for just writing a file converter.