A good read about Windows-8 and the life and death (and continued life) of Silverlight.
The author is a former product manager from Microsoft, so the reader should keep salt handy and bear any axe-grinding and shoulder-chips in mind.
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/960
(one particularly funny point:
…whilst at the same time we had to find a way to make Steve Sinofsky believe that Silverlight was killed off. )
One interesting thought (quote from the article):
Q. So… you saying Windows 8 is really Silverlight 6?
A. Yeah in concept yes. Technically no, but if you take a step back from our bad messaging, public realtion screw-ups and lastly our idiotic executive we pretty much did what you asked – we fixed WPF and Silverlight parity & performance and we made it also work on both desktop and mobile. I give you Windows 8.
(quote from the above referenced article)
Reed's Technical Notes 