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While Microsoft officials continue to remain mum on the subject of official Silverlight support for the iPhone, they have already proven that Silverlight-based media can be delivered to iPhones via some server-side magic. At PDC 09, Scott Guthrie announced IIS media streaming support for the iPhone which you can preview from an iPhone by visiting: http://www.iis.net/iphone. This isn’t really true Silverlight support for the iPhone, but rather some server-side sleight-of-hand where IIS Media Services can determine that the visitor is coming from an iPhone and rather than rendering a Silverlight player for rich media content, it can render an HTML5 video tag (which Apple supports).

We sat down with Scott Guthrie at PDC 09 and discussed the possibility of future Silverlight support for iPhone. While he couldn’t comment on future unreleased technologies, he did mention the strong relationship Microsoft has with Apple which resulted in the smooth streaming support now available on iPhones.

So this begs the question: If Microsoft and Apple have such a good relationship (despite the Mac vs. PC ads), how far off is official Silverlight support on the iPhone? We’d have to say not too far.

Apple is a self-proclaimed “hardware” company. They sell hardware and their software is meant to complement their hardware as evidenced by the fact that they run iTunes on almost zero profit margin simply to support and boost iPod sales. So, what could further support Apple hardware sales on devices besides iPods (iMacs, MacBooks, etc.)? The answer – more software! And, with Silverlight being a cross-platform technology (it runs on Mac and Windows), that promise of more software has arrived. It only seems that it is in Apple’s best interest to support Silverlight on as many devices as possible, including the iPhone.

Just imagine if Apple could get the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft developers writing apps that run on Macs and iPhones (using Silverlight). It’s a win-win for developers and Apple – write it once, deploy on multiple platforms. Just imagine Microsoft writing Office once (in Silverlight) and deploying it on both Macs, PCs, iPhones and other mobile devices. Adobe, QuickBooks, you name it. The more software the better. All of sudden, this is a game changer for Apple. No more, separation between PCs for business, Macs for the cool kids (media, graphics, fun). Sure, this could potentially take away from some AppStore sales, but it could pay huge dividends to Apple as they could become a big player in the business space with the increased software offering.

This is why the Silverlight 4 features that are coming in mid-2010 and future Silverlight releases will make Silverlight not just a cool technology, but rather a true platform.

Silverlight on the iPhone…just you wait!