Two months after the release of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft's browser plug-in for bringing rich audio and video capabilities to Web applications, CEO Steve Ballmer this morning showed off a new tool called "Popfly" that allows neophytes to create Web-based mashups without writing code.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at Web 2.0. (click to enlarge image).
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Calling the new application "at tool for end users, not necessarily codeheads," Ballmer showed off Popfly during a wide-ranging conversation with co-chair John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Designed to help Microsoft compete with Adobe's widely used Flash technology, Silverlight includes a presentation framework that handles images, text, animation, audio, and video. Runtime engines like Flash or Silverlight help speed up rich Web application by eliminating the need for communications back and forth between client and server.

Microsoft's Dan Fernandez ran a brief demo in which he created a series of combined applications -- a photo book of friends from Facebook, a "Whack-a-mole" game using his Facebook friends' photos, and a comparison of individuals' blogosphere popularity, using Technorati searches, that enlarges headshots based on whose name is mentioned most often on blogs -- without writing code.

Popfly is essentially a drag-and-drop application that blends different programs by matching up "blocks" or software modules such as the Whack-a-mole game and sets of photos from Facebook.

Ballmer also tempered some of his recent dismissive comments about Web-based applications from Microsoft competitors, particularly Google. At the annual Symposium ITxpo, hosted by research firm Gartner, Ballmer called the new entrants "pretenders" when it comes to serving enterprises and said Microsoft has a 17-year head start in "really building platforms." He has also referred to Google as a "one-trick pony."

"I meant [the one-trick pony comment] in a specific way," Ballmer told Battelle onstage at the conference. "There's one thing true about most tech companies: they start in one area, and then fill out around that core. IBM started in the enterprise, Cisco is now filling out around networking and making bits move around the Internet.

"What's unique about Microsoft is that we're two of these things," Ballmer claimed. "We started as a desktop software company, and now we have a large enterprise business. Now we've moved into devices and entertainment, and we're moving into advertising and the Web."

Ballmer compared Microsoft's Live Search, released from beta in September 2006, to a toddler competing against twelve-year-olds, and he repeated the statement that Microsoft will provide its core productivity applications, such as Office and Outlook, in various forms to meet individual users' and businesses' needs.

"What we do is focus on delivering the experience, in all technology models and models of computation -- whether that's in the cloud, locally, browser-based, in a rich client approach, or the Silverlight approach," he said.

He dismissed the idea, however, that eventually all software applications will be delivered via the Web -- which is the approach Google is taking with its cloud-based applications. And he couldn't resist letting his dismissive side show through once again.

"If you want to do what most of our customers do with Office, Google Docs is not very good," Ballmer said. "If a few people want to collaborate on a fairly simple project, there are some nice benefits in doing it across the Web.

"If you really want to do what people do in Word and Excel, then Word and Excel are best places."