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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.'"
If it doesn't work in Firefox, I'm not interested.
Oh wait... it does. Just kidding - still not interested.
MS is giving up after 3 days? wow!
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.
So... let's be realistic, how long before everyone's using this instead of Flash? My dib's on three years.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a breeze to program and work with.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind. Just like any web/presentation technology, it has it's pros and cons. But look, to work with Silverlight, to create Silverlight, you don't need an expensive suite of tools.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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
I remember when Netscape introduced frames, they changed the netscape.com website to use them. It lasted a few months, then they realised how silly they were and changed their website back.
Silverlight may be good for embedded applets and for applications, but it's ludicrous to use it for an entire website. I expect that Microsoft will shortly figure this out.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I have a new DELL laptop with XP SP2 on it (no way was I going to get Vista on it). Silverlight crashes both in Firefox and in IE7, even on a system that is has almost no other apps. I have pulled silverlight as something that may work someday, but at the moment is a pile of donkey poo.
See my journal, I write things there
You should have seen how badly the member website for Microsoft Certified Professionals crapped out when I tried getting in. The error message actually displayed a Guid.
And yes, I'm completely aware of the irony.
How to Google-proof your site in one easy step!
All trolling and MS-hating aside, Silverlight is not meant for the World Wide Web. Rather, it is, like many other Microsoft products (SharePoint, PerformancePoint, BizTalk, etc) for the corporate intranet. The corporate IT department can simply force the software onto everybody's computer, and the developers can easily develop a *real* UI without having to fumble around with trying to make HTML behave like Windows Forms.
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.
I'll tell you how Silverlight is Not Great, and I've never used it in the slightest. And it's not because it's by Microsoft, or because it's not free.
/x?html/.
It's Not Great for the same reason Flash is Not Great: it almost always results in a worse user interface than using normal
For the developer the site is The Thing. It's important that the site has clean code, looks cool, and is easy to maintain. Maybe Silverlight makes that possible.
For the user the site is likely just one stop on a journey tied together by a web search. It's important that the site behaves similarly to all others in certain respects: that the browser's navigation facilities work, that the browser's text search works, that input behavior for these are the same as on all other pages (keeping in mind that key bindings, mouse bindings, context menus, etc. vary from browser to browser and user to user). Flash breaks this, and if Silverlight doesn't do the same I'll be shocked.
For the developer it's tempting to think the site is a book to be read from start to finish. But users are more likely to look in the index, tear out a few pages, and glue them into collages of their own creation. The developer can use the introductory chapters to lay out unusual notational conventions that will apply throughout the text but the user, not having read from the beginning, is only confused to see them used in the middle. If you're tempted to cry and bitch about this as a developer, get over yourself: users have more important things to do in life than figure out this super cool new interface to your web site.
A big part of the reason the web took off is that its limited facilities for UI design forced sites to mostly follow the same conventions. If you want to do something better, more complicated, something that people have to learn, then write a damn desktop app.
(Yes, there are useful and good things that can be done by embedding Flash/Java in web pages. Nifty videos and games, no-install VNC and ssh clients... as long as they stay self-contained and aren't part of the page's navigation or textual information presentation, knock yourself out).
...that .Net was a clone of Java.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
In fact, Microsoft is only changing their download area to use Silverlight. In other words, surprise surprise - a kdawson article that is simply false. It's amazing, I know.
Microsoft dropped support for PPC Macs. I see this as a good hint on what commitment to expect from them regarding future platform independence and support.
Agreed. Mono is a piece of crap on its own merits. I apologize if I gave any other impression.
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono". It's decidedly developer-unfriendly, and using it on a Mac was not the cause of that.
On a system where Java is installed, things are easy to build and run. I can run "ant all" and everything magically compiles. I can look at the documentation and understand what every class and method does. If it runs on one system, I can expect it to run on the rest. Dependencies are clearly defined and easy to resolve. (And explicitly clear when tied to a given OS due to JNI dependencies.)
None of that describes Mono. Mono is a piece of crap that simply perpetuates a poor state of dependency hell, while wrapping your core software in a semi-portable bytecode that provides no real-world advantage in portability.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade