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?

[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?

[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?

[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...

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.