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MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com
Marilyn M. writes "It looks like Microsoft is getting desperate about the dismal rates of Silverlight adoption by consumers and developers since its release earlier this year. According to NeoSmart Technologies, Microsoft is preparing a fully Silverlight-powered redesign of their website, doing away with most HTML pages entirely. With over 60 million unique users visiting Microsoft.com a month, Microsoft's last-ditch effort might be what it takes to breathe some life back into Silverlight. The article notes: 'At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI.'"
Company tries to spur adoption of their technology by actually using it themselves! The ultimate act of desperation!
Film at 11.
Seriously? Wouldn't it be a bit more suspect if the *didn't* use it?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
TBH though, I am a .Net developer, so I may have a bit of bias. But the power and ease of development that Silver Light gives you is very impressive. It's not the right tool for every job, but for multi-media intensive, widely distributed apps, from the tools I've seen, it definitely has some great advantages.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
As a developer, I'm waiting for Silverlight 2.0 so that I can use .Net languages instead of that heap of crap which is Javascript.
Microsoft plans to use its website to push Silverlight technology adoption.
I remember when MSDN and other Microsoft sites were available only with IE. This was bad for who worked on Linux or used Netscape/Firefox but had to support Windows hosts. They finally changed their sites to be standard compliant (or at least, closer to that).
Now that they're losing market to Firefox and they're having to go standards compliant on HTML, they'll try to push a "better" technology to try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly.
If you look at it, OOXML is just the same, its integration with Sharepoint is another try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly on the web.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Silverlight is cross-platform and supported, because Microsoft will always own the format, lead its development, and introduce new incompatible features. Everyone will have to keep following them forever, not to mention that probably they'll start adding patented features or DRM. They've been doing this with every program and file format they have.
Flex is substantially easier to work with, had a ubiquitous install base, and transports easily to full desktop applications via Apollo.
We went to a full-day demo on Silverlight, given by a Microsoft developer. What they did in about 500 lines of Silverlight code was a pretty nice picture slideshow with smooth image transitions. What we did in about 500 lines of Flex was equivalent, but supported images of any size, allowed you to zoom in, supported a film strip mode, and carousel mode, as well as the standard fade-in, fade-out image transitions. Ours also is able to attach to ANY other language that is capable of delivering web services in a wide variety of formats (XMLRPC, SOAP, WSDL, flat XML, etc), and it only requires 1 line of code to change (or a switch statement if we wanted to support them all at once). Ours is more featureful, easier to read, understand, and maintain than the very best that Microsoft could produce in the same amount of code. It also performs better.
Seriously, I have seen both of these things in action, Silverlight is a long, LONG way away from being able to compete with Flex on both an install base perspective as well as an ease-of-development perspective. There is a reason people aren't adopting Silverlight, and install base is only a small part of it (though of course it itself is significant).
Microsoft is doing their usual bang-up job of supporting the minimal features to look competitive, then cramming it down people's throats until they forget there are better options out there. And well they should, they should be scared silly. Flex is poised to overthrow the desktop monopoly in a way that AJAX and Google Apps can't (wouldn't be surprised to see some Google apps on Flex in the future). To boot, you can convert these browser-based apps to offline desktop apps with about 30 minutes of work, and an Apollo redistributable.
Nothing has been this big of a threat to the desktop monopoly since Java. And Adobe has the gumption, power, and pocketbook to follow through. This is the source of the recent interest in Flash 9 on Linux. They don't care whether Linux users can view pretty animations, they care whether Linux users accept Flex, and being given access to Flex is the first step toward acceptance. They are also courting the open source community more and more (notice that the Flash Remoting spec was recently opened, which is actually a pretty big deal since it enables features that only they are able to deliver today), realizing I think that a lot of these Linux geeks are also IT decision makers.
Adobe is working on a version of Photoshop for the web, which from what I understand will be a combination of HTML/Ajax, Flex, and server-side processing. They are bringing levels of desktop functionality to the browser never before possible, and it has Microsoft bricking in their pants.
Over the coming months, expect to see Microsoft cramming Silverlight down your and anyone else's throat as rigorously as they are able to. It will be hidden in Windows Update files, it will be required to do various things on the Microsoft website, it will be bundled with software. They will make many applications in Silverlight which are better suited to other existing technologies (for example, the Microsoft website!!), because they want to make it as mandatory as they can without hitting anti-trust legislation.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!