"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 Tuesday 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 could face competition, he said.

By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, Google had not yet responded to an InfoWorld request for a reply to Scoble's pronouncements. A Microsoft official sidestepped the question of whether Microsoft planned to compete with Google with Silverlight.