Slashdot Mirror
Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers
ericatcw writes "At its Mix08 Web development conference, Microsoft said that its Silverlight rich Internet application platform is downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times every day; Microsoft has a goal of 200 million installs by midyear. But Silverlight is at the beginning of a long slog towards gaining traction. Computerworld did a quick analysis of job listings at nine popular career sites and found that an average of 41 times more ads mentioned Adobe's Flash than mentioned Silverlight. As expected only 6 months after Silverlight's introduction, the number of programming books carried on Amazon.com was also heavily skewed in favor of Flash."
That's right! Wow people still use Flash? Streaming games and videos on the internet? Who would ever want that!?! Yes, also I prefer my videos and games the old fashion way: slowly downloaded to my PC in very platform specific formats. Those young kids and their crazy Youtube, when will they ever learn that it's all just a fad! ;)
So on Ubuntu you had to install both Gnome and KDE libraries to get the code running. In your example that would be like installing JVM and .Net runtime on the same machine. At that point, both Java and .Net become "compatible".
And you must have never tried to do low-level programming for a specific chip. Although the general instruction sets are compatible, each one has special extensions. There's 3DNow, MMX, different special instructions to find chipsets, etc. So the CPUs are not completely compatible, but the OS and compiler just target the middle ground usually. When you work on trying to get most performance out of a chip (ie. games), you often need to create different assembly for Intel and AMD.
As far as benefits - you only have to look back at Netscape's behavior when it was the only fish on the internet. There was little innovation between N2 and N3. It was the competition with IE that fueled the rapid improvement in both. It also caused each browser to attempt to extend the standards to make themselves look like a better platform. Most people have forgotten netscape extensions, because they died out with Netscape, but they were there.
In general, lack of competition leads to stagnation, because there's little reason to innovate. Competition, on the other hand, requires you to differentiate from your competition. That may result in attempts to create extensions to a common base standard.
You are missing the point that just creating a competitor in another area is NOT abusing monopoly. Abusing monopoly is when you force a new technology by bundling it with your monopoly.
I'm not sure how you can claim that having a client-OS monopoly makes MS somehow able to dictate Windows Server/Exchange. Windows client OS has no problems talking Linux Samba, Linux DNS/DHCP servers, running thunderbird against google's IMAP server. All of those areas have competition with MS products.