Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight

mikejuk writes "The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight, isn't worth the effort any more. He said, 'Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought [it] would have to become. And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming. These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.'"

Comments

Same old microsoft

[LingNoi]

1) Create new technology
2) Market the hell out of it
3) Everyone gets hyped up, next big thing etc
4) Microsoft drops technology
5) repeat step 1

This has been their standard order of business for decades. Watch for the same thing to happen to "Metro" Microsoft's latest big thing..

Re:Same old microsoft

[poetmatt]

Actually, 3 is wrong.

In this case 3 was: nobody wanted this shit ever, forever and ever. People warned and warned and warned it was horrible, and Miguel along with Florian were the only people pushing for "oh, this is great, and it's open source!" (while not mentioning it was like 2+ years behind the entire time and MS would deliberately only support the latest versions) 4 and 5 still occur.

Same thing with windows ME, windows 8, the Ribbon bar, games for windows live, DRM pushed by intel/MS, etc.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Sarten-X]

Like most R&D-heavy companies, Google will promote and hype their new product, but if it doesn't take off, it'll die a quiet death. Their successful products will be promoted continually, as a means to build up the brand.

Microsoft, on the other hand, promotes its new technology, and when nobody cares, they promote it more, deprecate the old system, tack on a new name, integrate it with their next new project, then finally declare it deprecated (but still fully supported) when the new replacement comes out.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Darinbob]

The difference is that when Google does this everybody yawns (except for the 10 or so who post blogs about how game changing it will be). But when Microsoft does this for a half-finished technology of theirs, everybody starts to go nuts and IT houses start hiring people with 5 years experience in it, all the analysts claim you need to have it, corporations create internal policies regarding it, and the Mono team starts investigating a cross platform version.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[cpu6502]

I thought the necessity for Silverlight (and Flash) was obsoleted by HTML 5? I think both these programs need to disappear.

HTML5 convergence

[johanwanderer]

This is just another sign of the industry converging to HTML5 as the primary display API. Flash is going away, now Silverlight is, too. Hopefully the companies will increase their efforts to allow users / developers to migrate existing applications to the new API.

Re:HTML5 convergence

[ArhcAngel]

Flash is going away,

Flash is the new IE6. Ten years from now corporations will still be clinging to it while everyone else is running HTML17.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Sarten-X]

Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...

Silverlight was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Flash, but HTML 5 is already the generally-accepted answer to Flash. It was supposed to enable web-based applications to run on the desktop, but the widespread adoption of AJAX and other browser technologies has made that goal unnecessary, too. It was supposed to be a mechanism for Microsoft to claim dominance of up-and-coming technologies, but it's just yet another failure on Ballmer's running list of "too little, too late" achievements.

Re:Netflix

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Netflix isn't getting paid off by MS for this. There are two interesting aspects to the Netflix-on-Linux problem, one obvious, one not.

Obvious problem: Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is on the board of directors of Microsoft. This, almost definitely, gives him sips of kool-aid and some self-interest in growing Microsoft's market share for its pet projects.

Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.

From what I understand, the actual minds at Netflix wanted a Linux product, know how to make it happen (to the point where they have internally tested it and it works) and would release it if it were feasible but the studios are hogtying them with contracts.