Too Little, Too Late: Silverlight 1.0 Launched, With Linux Support

Filed under Flash, Flex, Industry by Chad | 5 comments

Hmm, everyone that has talked to me or readthis blog in the last year has known I am firmly in the trenches as a then Macromedia now Adobe developer, and an avowed Macophile… That’s why it’s no surprise that I have written a couple posts about how Microsoft Silverlight is DOA and how it’s still DOA.. well, with the 1.0 release, it might not be DOA, but it’s certainly on a respirator and limping. Silverlight 1.0 Launched, With Linux Support

Why? One little video codec H.264 and the most ubiquitous web plugin in the world. Flash. I know that the H.264 capable Flash plugin is only in beta, but when it hits and Youtube or Revver or some other big players in the market switch over, expect to see the changeover in web video to happen quickly. WMV can’t really compete in terms of pervasiveness with the Flash and QuickTime players both being H.264 capable… that has to be 95%+ penetration (just an educated guess)… as a web developer, you just sniff the Flash plugin and if you have it, great, play the flash version, if not, sniff QuickTime… done and done… high quality web video for everyone.

I know Silverlight has the CLR going for it, but with no cross platform IDE, it’s still a nonstarter for a large chunk of the media producing community. With Flex going open-source, Adobe seems to be hitting everything correctly, IMHO.

Posted on September 5, 2007

5 comments

1. Brandon Ellis Sep 5

   My thoughts exactly.
   “Microsoft Releases Silverlight 1.0… and nobody cares.”

2. TJ Downes Sep 5

   Living in a bubble is nice… but as a fanatical Adobe developer I’m not so fooled into believing that MS is too late or that nobody cares….

3. Chad Sep 6

   TJ, very valid point. I’m sure that Silverlight will have it’s devotees, but I don’t see it being a majority choice of delivery method for most web developers. I’ll eat my words when I enter my first client consultation and they say “We want a Silverlight Site”

4. Kailie Quinn Feb 8

   I can see how you’d think that, as microsoft is being true to form about not bothering to advertise their best technologies. The purpose of silverlight is to allow you to deliver WPF forms applications to clients on any platform without having to reauthor them for any specific platform. Eventually there will be native WPF runtimes released for all operating systems.

   It is not, and was never intended to be (even though they insist on advertising it with flashy entertainment things) a flash replacement. I don’t think anyone will argue that you can develop more effictive applications faster with full access to a native OS api than you can with a scripting language. Kind of like stacking visual studio 2008 against flash cs3. Both good apps, but they serve different purposes.

5. Hydrolyze Feb 18

   I have been looking all around for this specific information. Good thing I just found this at Yahoo.

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