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."

Comments

Why switch?

[TheSpoom]

Why should I, as a Flash developer / animator, move to a less stable, less well-known, less-compatible platform from one that is stable, has many developers, is cross-platform (mostly), and can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already?

Not that I am a Flash developer (at least, I haven't been for a while), it's just a hypothetical.

I think the answer for Microsoft is "because we need you to help us create another hook to keep people on Windows." Linux beta, eh? I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:Why switch?

[kurokaze]

I think more to the point is that Silverlight has been out less than a year, and yet Computerworld somehow thinks that there's going to be lots of books and job demand for it?? Oh brother.

What's a job posting going to say? Wanted: Experienced Silverlight Developer, must have 3+ yrs experience even though the product itself has been out less than a year.

Re:Why switch?

[TheSpoom]

Wanted: Experienced Silverlight Developer, must have 3+ yrs experience even though the product itself has been out less than a year.

Common enough on job boards anyway. ;^)

Re:Why switch?

[SanityInAnarchy]

can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already?

Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any .NET language. That's something Flash doesn't do -- yet -- although they are coordinating with Mozilla to develop a common runtime which would make JavaScript fast, and also support other languages.

I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

Heh. When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition, because no one distro can fill everyone's needs. Yet when MS puts out a competitor to Java, and now Flash, it's "why do we need more than one?"

Competition is good.

Re:Why switch?

[sm62704]

This Dilbert cartoon and this Dilbert cartoon are the perfect illustrations for your post. Look at those links in order, one follows the other.

"Candidate must have an IQ of 300, two centuries of Unix experience and a track record of wining Nobel prizes."

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

I'm afraid you are comparing apples and oranges here.

Various linux distributions are pretty much application compatible. It's mainly just the packaging and the configuration tools that make two distributions look differently and maybe one or two specific drivers.

Silverlight vs. Flash or .NET vs. Java is something completely different. Those are competing technologies, incompatible with each other, and also not available on the same platforms (Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit).

Don't kid yourself - the reasoning behind Silverlight has nothing to do with Microsoft striving to make the Web a better place. It's all about gaining more control of a medium they never had much to say with (apart from the dominance of the IE, which is now being chewed at by Mozilla/Firefox)

Re:Why switch?

[SharpFang]

Because Flash can't do 3D.

At least, can't do sufficiently advanced 3D with sufficient performance.

Is it worth it? I don't know, really. But it's easy to miss the point when a technology turns from 'mature' to 'obsolete' and from 'experimental' to 'cutting edge'.

COBOL programmers kept smirking at JAVA developers too.

Re:Why switch?

[TheNetAvenger]

Why?

1) Performance features - for example an application in silverlight that pulls HD image formats in small chunks, allowing you to zoom into 100mb images instantly. (This is just one example)

2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well. Also the ability to support live and multi-cast streaming of HD Video (great for lowbandwidth servers hosting live events, and still providing an HD video of the event.)

3) Easier - By the nature of how Silverlight is designed it is easier to design for and work with. You are basically just managaging Vista type XAML from WPF. No secret formats, etc.

4) Agnostic programming - Silverlight you not only get a rich vector/bitmap based environment, but it is completely language agnostic and you can use anything from C# to VB to Python.

5) Web Page interoperability - Silverlight is designed to within the context of the Web Page. For example you could hvae 10 Silverlight buttons on the page, and they are all separate from each otehr, but tied together via common code in JScript. This would be 'heavy' to do in Flash, and it wouldn't be easy to split the buttons apart, so you would ahve to design all the buttons in one Flash control, consuming the page with Plash, instead of just working with the page. Think of Silverlight as a cool new picture type that is also programmable, handles events, and animation when used like this.

6) Features - Silverlight 1.0 is on par with Flash in terms of features, and has several Flash just cannot do. Silverlight 2.0 brings in a whole set of .NET controls, etc that surpass anything Flash can do.

7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. So far Silverlight is showing to be semi-equally fast on Windows and OS X, with low memory consumption on both. The same Flash applet running on Windows could use a couple of MB and running on OS X jump to 30MB and peg the CPU. Flash is NOT as crossplatform as developers would like to lead people to believe because of performance issues like this.

8) Security - Silverlight is more secure than Flash (see recent Flash updates), the reason Silverlight is more secure because it runs inside an additional sandbox and is also managed code, it is .NET based.

9) Structure XAML - The nature of how Silverlight is designed is based on Vista's WPF/XAML system. Vista uses XAML from everything from on screen display to printing (XAML is like OS X's Display PDF but with a chunk more features.) This means that Windows developers can easily move from Windows programming .NET 3.0 to Silverlight or the other way around. The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc. (As printing technology moves to eInk that is dynamic, XAML is ready to print to and produce output on these devices already, even though this is a years off concept.)

Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash. (Microsoft also just announced Silverlight for non Windows Mobile phones to be an alternative to Flash Lite.)

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE?

The market fixes this problem itself very nicely, if not immediately.

If Microsoft does those things, there's suddenly a golden opportunity for another competitor or competitors to get going -- they'll be able to gain mindshare and traction much more easily from nothing, because they'll be providing something Microsoft isn't.

Witness the way that Microsoft won the browser war and stopped work on IE, only to have Firefox emerge and provide strong competition. I know this is slashdot and it's free software uber alles and all, but realistically, if Microsoft had kept working on IE as hard as they were when they were trying to beat Netscape, there either never would have been a Firefox, or basically no one outside of slashdot-like communities would care. They didn't do that, and so a lot of people that in the continually-improving-super-IE alternate world wouldn't even be looking for a Firefox or who wouldn't want to work on improving a Firefox or who wouldn't want to make plug-ins for Firefox were primed for it.

So in short, yes, Microsoft could do what you're saying if Silverlight crushed Flash, but it wouldn't last for long.

Re:Why switch?

[Tablizer]

Who is more evil. Catbert or Dogbert?

Which uses emacs and which uses vi?

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

Bundling is certainly one way to abuse a monopoly. Another way is limiting interoperability. It's especially powerful when the two are used together. The ability to share calendars in Outlook requires Exchange on the server side. By bundling Outlook into Office and trial versions of Office with Windows, users get exposed to Outlook. Then they find out they need to run Exchange to share their calendars, which requires a Windows Server. By default, Exchange uses MAPI to communicate with email clients, so all users who connect to the Exchange server find they need to use Outlook, which requires Windows on the desktop.

Similarly, Microsoft bundling IE with Windows caused the usage of IE to go so high that some developers wrote sites that work only in IE. To access those sites, users now find they need to run Windows to run IE so they can access those sites.

You're woefully naive if you think Microsoft is in the business of creating products that compete on a level playing field with products from other companies. They are well skilled at using bundling and limiting interoperability to lock users into other Microsoft products. I note that Silverlight is not compatible with other multimedia players and will be bundled with Windows. Hmmm...

Re:Why switch?

[Snover]

You've written a nice list, but I just don't see anything on it that's really, well, valid.

1) As far as performance in general is concerned, ActionScript 3 is extremely fast. Though I definitely wouldn't say the same about ActionScript 2, it's not fair to compare an old version of Flash against a recent version of Silverlight.

2) Flash Player 9 Update 3, which was released in December of last year, supports H.264 and HE-AAC.

3) Flex uses a similar XML-based format called MXML for describing applications. Of course, "easier" is relative -- I'm sure if you've been working as a Windows programmer forever it's easier, but maybe not for someone that isn't used to how Microsoft does things. Also, what's a "secret format" that Flash has? The entire SWF specification is open (well, except to use to build a Flash player, which is pretty stupid), and ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript specification.

4a) Flash has a "rich vector/bitmap based environment" (whatever that means -- it can draw on bitmaps and do transformations and effects, and it can draw vector shapes), and has since forever. How is this any worse than what Silverlight has (speaking as someone that has not used Silverlight)?

4b) No, you can't use any language you want, but I don't necessarily see this as a huge advantage, since it adds an amount of additional complexity that could easily be problematic. You can't ask for "a Silverlight" programmer, now you have to ask for "a Silverlight programmer that also knows Python/C#/whatever" -- this will really narrow your potential hiring pool.

5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".

6) Have you even looked at what Flash provides lately? ActionScript 3 is an extremely capable language. Without giving any specific examples of features that don't/can't exist in Flash, but that do in Silverlight, it's hard to respond to this. Provide an example and we'll talk.

7) I've not personally experienced performance issues with Flash applications on OS X, but YMMV. Since I don't use Windows, it's hard for me to say if something runs more slowly than it would on a Windows box, but I never ran anything that seemed slow or that pegged my CPU. I've heard that it's slower on PPC architectures, but Windows never ran on PPC to begin with, so who knows how Flash would run on Windows if there were a PPC version. I've never ever run a Silverlight application, so I can't confirm your allegation that it works better, either.

8) Can you provide a specific example of how the security model of Silverlight is more any more secure? Flash code runs in a sandboxed virtual machine ("managed code" for non-Microsofties out there) too, and has since the beginning of time. Saying "see recent Flash updates" just says to me that Adobe has addressed potential security issues that may have existed, and hardly damns the platform as being somehow tragically insecure. (And, in fact, the recent security updates to Flash are nothing more than hardening against some potential XSS attacks.)

9) Sounds like MXML, again. Don't repeat yourself, you already mentioned XAML once. ;) Talking about "Display PDF" as if it were some markup language makes no sense, too, since Display is an application for viewing PDF files -- nothing more.

Now, I'm certainly no Flash apologist -- up until about a month ago I refused to touch it, and ActionScript 2 is unbelievably shitty -- and certainly if we were comparing against Flash 8 or earlier running ActionScript 2 you'd have some valid points, but nothing on your list actually seems to me to be a valid reason why Silverlight is better than Flash here and now. And again, despite your protests that Microsoft is developing an OS X version of Silverlight, and is working with Mono to develop a Linux version, they have not been above releasing software for platforms and then dropping it without cause in the past, and I haven't seen them changing their colours.

Regards,

This is a surprise??

[kurokaze]

NewsFlash!! Brand new technology has less presence in market compared to entrenched, established technology!

Holy Cow! Stop the presses! This is big news!

Freakin' Troll of a story if I've ever seen one.

Poster is Astroturfing?

[TheSpoom]

Check out ericatcw's previous Slashdot stories:

"Google Apps Slow to Replace Competition"
"Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser"

Hell of a coincidence that they're all pro-Microsoft.

Re:Incorrect headline

[Renderer of Evil]

I can spin too:

Supply Outstrips Demand for Silverlight
Undownloaded Installers Prove Problematic for Redmond Giant

Waiting for 2.0

[Westley]

I suspect many developers have been waiting for 2.0 as the "real" Silverlight. It feels to me like 1.0 was mostly a stake in the ground to make it clear that MS is trying for the same market as Flex etc - but it wasn't enough to build proper applications.

2.0 should (if it lives up to hype/expectations) be much more useful.

Given that beta 1 has only just been released, it's not at all surprising that there isn't a lot of demand for developers in the marketplace yet, nor books available.

Re:Why switch? Because Flash drops the ball?

[King_TJ]

I'm not preaching that Silverlight holds the answers, or anything remotely like that. But in MANY people's opinions, Flash technology has really "dropped the ball" when it comes to keeping up with the times.

When I first remembered it gaining in popularity, people were simply fascinated by the new-found ability to make web sites look more sophisticated and polished. You could do photo-realistic animations with your menus, have 3D fonts moving about the screen without having to render them ahead of time, trying to scale/size them for the page you were going to paste them in, etc.

In the present, most people take a "been there, seen that" attitude towards Flash-heavy web pages. They look for the "skip" button as soon as one opens up, because they know the real "content" isn't going to be found in waiting for the bar graph to finish loading to 100% completion, only to hear some techno music playing behind a big video with the corporate logo spinning around. The places where I see Flash used today tend to be interactive games, such as the children's games developed for sites like pbskids.org or nickjr.com.

In this arena, Flash may still be "king" - but it sure isn't giving a stable experience! I have a 5 year old, so I know! She loves playing the mini-games on these web sites, but I'm constantly hearing, "Dad!! Help! It stopped working!", only to go over to the PC and find it frozen up, or the arrow keys unresponsive in the game. Usually, I have to refresh the whole thing, losing her position in the game. Sometimes, the whole browser has to be closed and restarted.

It's even worse if you're not using the "preferred platform" of a Windows box running Internet Explorer 7.

Adobe long ago dropped support for their Flash player for classic MacOS, for example. Sure, it's an "outdated" platform, but an awful lot of old iMac G3's and G4's are still out there being used as "kid's computers", so this is a place where a current Flash player would still get a lot of use! They still have no Flash player developed for Apple's iPhone either, and that's an example of a NEW device they should have been on top of from the start.

They're certainly making a great case for themselves that somebody ELSE needs to come along with a competing product!