Now, I wrote a few weeks ago about how Silverlight had little future in my mind, and I still stick by that… I got mostly affirmative views on my post, with nearly all commenters agreeing on my points. One commenter today had a rebuttal that just didn’t sit very well with me. BTW, I think it’s great I got conflicting views ‚Äì as I definitely asked for it, encouraged it… I’ll post his comment and dissect his points… I like a discussion like this so Tim, thanks for your comments, really.
His comment:

“No plug in for Linux ‚Ķ it was only in January of this year that the flash plugin was released for Linux, version 9 of the plugin, that was a long wait.”

-It was a long wait, yes, but it is over. Adobe has produced a modern plugin for Linux. The guys from the Mono project did say that they’ll bring Silverlight to Linux, so maybe that will be a shorter length wait, but through no fault of Microsoft, this is because of the Open Source community’s support and action.

“Market Penetration = Demand ‚Ķ this is mainly due to Microsoft packaging the flash plugin with IE, which it is not doing from IE7, this must have an effect on penetration figures.”

- I stand by my assertion that content drives it. Now, if Silverlight is picked up by a couple Movie studios, a good video site or two and a few bands or other viral sites things may change, but otherwise, unless you chance upon it in the wild, you probably won’t get a prompt to install Silverlight.

“The Growing Mobile Content Market ‚Ķ Microsoft is already well positioned in the mobile market with smartphones and pocketpc phones.”

-What multimedia content will be playing on them? FlashLite content.

Maturity … Although the version number of the flash plugin is 9, there are a lot of features that are only one or two version old eg, there has only been one version since integrated video (which has been changed once already from sorenson to on2vp6). I think flash has a lot more maturing to do yet. Microsoft has maturity in a lot of other server based apps, WMP and IE. I don’t think saying flash been around for a decade is going make a difference.

-I believe it was Flash 7 that brought video. That would make it three versions of Flash can be targeted with support for video. The move from Sorenson to On2 was simply a codec, not a format change, so I don’t quite get your point.

“The Developer Community ‚Ķ People making money from other people sounds perfectly reasonable.”

-Making money for a service, a paid component that is particularly valuable, etc., is indeed great and a great cottage industry, but as evidenced by proto.layer51.com, flashkit, flexbox, communitymx, sourceforge, freshmeat and so many others, a community is more successful when people collaborate freely and openly. Useful code libraries and CMS systems are grown this way and even the most stripped down .Net equivalents of things like Drupal and PHPBB are expensive.

“CS3 ‚Ķ Expression Designer is a step in the right direction, but I take your point, flash has a nice focused development environment with the support from a suite of other products. I think Microsoft can catch up here with the resources they have.”

-I don’t see them buying or developing a video editing, compositing, photo editing, vector illustration, page layout, content management application, DVD authoring application, image compression and rapid prototyping application and an application that ties them all together seamlessly and serves as a replacement for Windows Explorer anytime soon.

Now, all that said, MS creating Silverlight is indeed a good thing, because it theoretically pushes Adobe to add things like 3D Hardware acceleration, a decent HTML parser, support for advanced text handling like sub and superscript, support for HD video, lower server licensing costs and all kinds of other things that I can’t even see right now.

Posted on May 3, 2007

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