MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com 710
Marilyn M. writes "It looks like Microsoft is getting desperate about the dismal rates of Silverlight adoption by consumers and developers since its release earlier this year. According to NeoSmart Technologies, Microsoft is preparing a fully Silverlight-powered redesign of their website, doing away with most HTML pages entirely. With over 60 million unique users visiting Microsoft.com a month, Microsoft's last-ditch effort might be what it takes to breathe some life back into Silverlight. The article notes: 'At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI.'"
Wow (Score:1, Insightful)
That's 60 million people who won't go to microsoft.com anymore.
MSDN Library (Score:4, Insightful)
If it wasn't required to visit windowsupdate.com, it would be the nail in IE's coffin.
Re:Firefox... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it doesn't work in Firefox, I'm not interested.
I will add, if it does not work with Firefox/Linux, not interested.
Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a breeze to program and work with.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind. Just like any web/presentation technology, it has it's pros and cons. But look, to work with Silverlight, to create Silverlight, you don't need an expensive suite of tools.
History repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Netscape introduced frames, they changed the netscape.com website to use them. It lasted a few months, then they realised how silly they were and changed their website back.
Silverlight may be good for embedded applets and for applications, but it's ludicrous to use it for an entire website. I expect that Microsoft will shortly figure this out.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:News flash! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about them using it themselves.
It's about them leveraging an existing product to force the adoption of a new product.
Bullet Point Three (Score:4, Insightful)
That bit, the third numbered bullet, is what matters. They aren't doing something special, they are just forcing their technology on others because they can. Now I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens, because frankly I think MS's current site is a mess (I can never find what I'm looking for). But if they are going to push something like this they should go all out and demonstrate what it can do, not just use it in place of JavaScript (which they tried to replace with VBScript and failed) and AJAX (which they invented, to a degree).
Yeah but (Score:3, Insightful)
They're already spamming us (Score:2, Insightful)
search engine issues? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about anyone else but I use Google to find KB articles.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is this ISNT just another web technology, this is a MICROSOFT technology, which historically has always ment you need to run a Microsoft Enironment to get the benefit out of it. Microsofts not evil, but they're not exactlly open either.
Re:Firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably 0....
So in other words they don't care about your situation because most likely you are not going to visit it. Makes completely logical sense actually.
Not that I think their strategy is great...
Re:News flash! (Score:5, Insightful)
This [adobe.com] site doesn't force me to use Flash.
Desperate? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real value of Silverlight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
I will add, if it does not work with Firefox/Linux, not interested.
For those interested in Linux/Silverlight info, the Linux version is called "Moonlight" [novell.com] and is being developed by Novell with Microsoft's help.
Come on... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just about as ridiculous as it gets. Let's at least get 'facts' out of the way.
Face #1, The final version of Silverlight 1.0 was released just a couple of months ago. Even the designers (Blend, etc) haven't had full final version native support for over a month. Do you really think MS is 'desperate' that in a month or two every web site in the world hasn't converted?
Fact #2, MS already has a large following of providers preparing and starting stream and video based web video content sites based on Silverlight. Since it can do things like flip channels as fast a TV, etc companies looking to provide multi-stream content are going with Silverlight as it is the only viable solution - let alone the only multi-platform solution.
Fact #3, a majority of Video pushed over the web is already in VC1/WMV format, yes this sounds strange with all the flash/Tube sites, but Windows Media is still either at the very top or close. Silverlight natively uses the same content, so for any site using WMV content already, they will flip to silverlight, as it will increase their user base.
Fact #4, Silverlight is about a 2mb download, I see posts where people seem to think this is a big issue, are these people still using 2400baud modems?
Fact #5, The major version of SilverLight is Version 1.1, and can be downloaded by developers/end users. Version 1.1 is the major version as 1.0 is only the graphical and video portion of the technology with limited UI abilities. (1.0 is the basic drawing and compatibility layers, and MS doesn't expect most people to consider Silverlight until 1.1, that is why the 'standard developer version they offer is 1.1, not 1.0) Silverlight 1.1 adds in the UI basic interface technologies like simple control events, additional hit testing, etc. Without 1.1.
The Microsoft Download site has been Silverlight based for a few weeks, but it is a conceptual site, and it is demonstrated to developers of multiple page content areas can interact beyond a single SilverLight Control.
Fact #6, a Silverlight based Website does not mean the entire page is based on Silverlight or the page is shown in only one Silverlight control like Flash based web design is. Silverlight is light enough that each Image element can be replaced with a Silverlight Object instead, and when needed, Silverlight Objects can use standard client/server scripting for communication and functionality between the Objects.
It would be easier to think of Silverlight like a 'fancy' image object that can be scripted, take events, and talk to the client/server and other image objects on the page. This is what makes silverlight ahead of Flash, even before v1.1 is released.
Now with facts out of the way, this makes a freaking difference in the OSS world how? One proprietary company/product is competing against another that is just as nefarious, and they are BOTH winning against ALL OSS solutions.
Maybe OSS should actually be pushing for Silvelight to win, as you can at least create Silverlight content in notepad for free, and aren't forced to buy a massive Adobe illustration package just to put a few pretty buttons or videos on your site.
Back to the anti-Microsoft goose-stepping...
Re:Firefox... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:History repeating (Score:3, Insightful)
If I was a marketing manager for another Microsoft product, I wouldn't be happy with the Silverlight folks forcing me to limit my content to people who have Silverlight installed. Of course, perhaps they are all drinking the coolaid.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:2, Insightful)
Warning! MS inexorable business model... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:History repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
At that point you can't even call it a website any more; it's just a graphical .NET application that happens to be delivered over HTTP.
And yes, the same is absolutely true for pure-Flash websites, too. But this is made slightly less onerous because Adobe provides versions of the Flash plugin for Linux and OS X that are ostensibly on par with the Windows version, and Adobe doesn't lock you into a single platform for developing Flash apps -- unlike Microsoft, Adobe's end game is not to create a sea of de-facto "standard" applications for which the company's own operating system is the best, or only, choice.
Re:Firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They're already spamming us (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. People on /. should stop trying to talk about how great Linux and MacOSX are. I mean, if they were so great they would be dominant already.
New products always need advertising. But what I'm really curious about is how is Silverlight not great? I haven't examined the issue yet (I thought it was still in Beta, so I don't consider their advertising excessibe), but you obviously have carefully weighted all the pros and cons, so I'm interested in your view. Or maybe your logic was "Boo, hiss, MS is the devil."
Re:Geesh (Score:2, Insightful)
If you'd said "encourage" rather than "force", you might have had a point....
Re:WARNING: Incredibly Morose Statement Following (Score:2, Insightful)
Mac sales are at an all time high and increasing. Linux usability is better than ever and drawing converts. OpenOffice and NeoOffice support VBA. Microsoft should be focusing on not pissing off its userbase and the potential users on who currently use other platforms, not making a product that annoys people by requiring a download from them and doesn't work properly on other platforms. They should try to make a decent product that people are willing to pay for and not remove right away. Silverlight won't become the dominant web development system. It is just another part in Microsoft's plan to drive themselves into irrelevance over the next decade. Maybe they'll go back to being an application developer for other systems, more like they were before Windows and DOS.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also the benefit of being able to use any
Yes, the newest version of ActionScript is a lot better than previous versions--and better than any other derivative of ECMAScript I've seen. But it's still no match for the VisualStudio +
Honestly, I'm not a huge Microsoft fan. Over the last year I've spent more time developing in PHP than any other language.
But c'mon... Silverlight does have some compelling arguments.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a piece of crap. [slashdot.org]
When I finally got it up and running, I had as many problems with the API set as I did with the documentation. Mono is junk that gives people a false impression that
Look at Adobe.com. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd imagine you can view the entire site, save for Flash-specific stuff, without Flash.
It's one thing to use their technology themselves, but this tells me that Microsoft is actually using Silverlight to replace HTML, which is something that is generally considered bad when people do it with Flash, and is also something that even Adobe isn't doing with Flash.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even MS partners dislike Silverlight (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that's exactly why linux has waited years before finally getting Flash 9. And to think that post is modded insightful.
Re:Firefox... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They're already spamming us (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Not Great for the same reason Flash is Not Great: it almost always results in a worse user interface than using normal
For the developer the site is The Thing. It's important that the site has clean code, looks cool, and is easy to maintain. Maybe Silverlight makes that possible.
For the user the site is likely just one stop on a journey tied together by a web search. It's important that the site behaves similarly to all others in certain respects: that the browser's navigation facilities work, that the browser's text search works, that input behavior for these are the same as on all other pages (keeping in mind that key bindings, mouse bindings, context menus, etc. vary from browser to browser and user to user). Flash breaks this, and if Silverlight doesn't do the same I'll be shocked.
For the developer it's tempting to think the site is a book to be read from start to finish. But users are more likely to look in the index, tear out a few pages, and glue them into collages of their own creation. The developer can use the introductory chapters to lay out unusual notational conventions that will apply throughout the text but the user, not having read from the beginning, is only confused to see them used in the middle. If you're tempted to cry and bitch about this as a developer, get over yourself: users have more important things to do in life than figure out this super cool new interface to your web site.
A big part of the reason the web took off is that its limited facilities for UI design forced sites to mostly follow the same conventions. If you want to do something better, more complicated, something that people have to learn, then write a damn desktop app.
(Yes, there are useful and good things that can be done by embedding Flash/Java in web pages. Nifty videos and games, no-install VNC and ssh clients... as long as they stay self-contained and aren't part of the page's navigation or textual information presentation, knock yourself out).
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:2, Insightful)
And what does that mean "special libraries" like Mono. Windows doesn't come with Silverlight either. So basically, on Windows you have to download Silverlight, on Mac OS-X you have to download Silverlight, and on Linux you have to download Mono/Moonlight. It has absolutely nothing to do with "your(sic) not running a main OS". How exactly is having Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux platform coverage tying you to any OS? Especially with a GPL implementation?!
It is a Microsoft technology, which also has a GPL open source implementation and runs on all platforms.
Thank you for the anti-MS FUD. Please drive through.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not saying Flash is wonderful, in fact like I said I prefer HTML. Why? I know the spec. If the spec chagnes I know about it. If Microsoft, after destroying the competition, decides to drop support for the fringe markets like OSX and Linux, whatchagonna do about it? Just like Adobe did with Flash (for awhile there installing Flash on Linux was a PITA) Now if Adobe provides bad Linux support, how well do you think Microsoft will do?
Hell look at stuff like IE for Mac. Ya, Microsofts history of providing a multi-platform environment is just littered with such stuff. This isn't Microsoft FUD, I dont trust Adobe or Apple to be much better, hence why stuff by a STANDARDS BODY for stuff like HTML is the way to go. NOT Flash. NOT Silverlight. But for now I consider Flash the lesser of two evils.
With HTML I dont have to worry about what kindness an organization provides, and whether or not they feel dropping support is best for Them.
Enough is enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, Microsoft is only changing their download area to use Silverlight. In other words, surprise surprise - a kdawson article that is simply false. It's amazing, I know.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have Silverlight installed, check out their new Downloads Center: http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/Default.aspx [microsoft.com]
Aside from a few fancy but ultimately pointless animations, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done in plain HTML/CSS 8 years ago. And look at the cost to the user of that decision: Text selection and copying is broken, the find feature of your browser won't find anything, you can't copy link locations or open links in a new tab or window, and the status bar won't show you link locations. Not to mention, if they go through with this, I'm sure that it will make Googling for anything on Microsoft.com virtually useless. (which is about the only way I ever find anything on either Microsoft or MSDN, as their built in navigation and search functionality is surprisingly useless.)
So, yeah, Silverlight's a pretty cool platform, and you can do some really neat stuff with it. But building a whole site with it is definitely high up there on the ways to ensure that nobody visits your site, or that the people who have to visit hate every minute of it.
Re:News flash! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's something Microsoft does right. When I have to enumerate the best products Microsoft makes, I say, in that order, the Natural keyboard series, their mice and SQL Server (which is a respectable database server, even if it runs on a less than respectable OS).
Those three are good.
As for the rest... Well... They did the Apple II+ BASIC, didn't they? That was cool.
Isn't that a Flamewar Title? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News flash! (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, no one has to visit the MS website.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Silverlight works with Firefox, Safari, and IE.
You know the spec for HTML? Which one? Transitional HTML 4.01? Strict HTML 4.01? XHTML? I highly doubt you actually *know* the spec for HTML. What you know is how to write HTML that works. Other people know how to write Silverlight code that works. Your arguments for Microsoft cutting support for Linux don't make any sense. Mono is an open source GPLed project, which happens to have some Microsoft backing and support due to their own desire to see Silverlight succeed and the agreement they have with Novell who is backing Mono. However, it's still an open source GPL project. Saying "what if Microsoft changes everything" doesn't make sense. You could make the same argument against Samba (prior to the recent release of the SMB documentation after many years of reverse engineering).
The fact is, once Moonlight is up and rolling, there's no need for Microsoft's support to continue keeping it up to date. If they add some new function blah(x,y) they have to document that function in order for Silverlight users to actually make use of it, which means writing your own version of blah(x,y) from scratch wouldn't be that big of a deal. Open source projects like Samba have been doing this for years with NO documentation.
Considering Microsoft's very early support for multiple platforms and for an open source implementation, and the years it took to even get a crappy version of Adobe Flash for Linux out of Adobe, it's really funny that you consider Flash the lesser of two evils.
It's also really funny that you're so hot on the standards body for HTML and how great it is to have one true standard, when the whole HTML "standard(s)" and all of the commercial implementations of it are in shambles. No disrespect to the W3C community, but right now the par for a good HTML rendering browser is "whatever is better than Microsoft's support". We have 3 rolling standards, of which there is no actual implementation of 100% of the standard. I'm pretty sure Flash renders 100% compatible Flash, and Silverlight renders 100% compatible Silverlight. If you look at the same HTML on Windows and Mac, you'll get different output on many web pages, but if you look at Silverlight on Windows and Mac, you'll get the same output.
With HTML you do have to worry about what kindness an organization provides, because you have to worry about how much of your HTML "standard" (and which one) they choose to support, and how much of it they choose to support. You're just as dependent on browser implementations as Silverlight and Flash people are on their plugins. There's no difference anywhere except in your mind.
Oh, and both Silverlight and Flash are filing to become standardized specifications under standards bodies. Look at
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Insightful)
Shows API code
"Oooh, shiny!"
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about the fact that the
Or how about the fact that your
Or how about the fact that you can mix multiple languages in a silverlight project (like ALL
Or how about an entire eco-system of tools and generators and add-ons for Visual Studio and the framework?
Of course, with flash, you get...
well...
None of that.
Re:Enough is enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox... (Score:3, Insightful)
PS: Better work in Safari/OS X.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Mono is a piece of crap on its own merits. I apologize if I gave any other impression.
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono". It's decidedly developer-unfriendly, and using it on a Mac was not the cause of that.
On a system where Java is installed, things are easy to build and run. I can run "ant all" and everything magically compiles. I can look at the documentation and understand what every class and method does. If it runs on one system, I can expect it to run on the rest. Dependencies are clearly defined and easy to resolve. (And explicitly clear when tied to a given OS due to JNI dependencies.)
None of that describes Mono. Mono is a piece of crap that simply perpetuates a poor state of dependency hell, while wrapping your core software in a semi-portable bytecode that provides no real-world advantage in portability.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, something I can probably reverse engineer is not a substitute for something that is open. By this logic Wine [winehq.com] should be a perfect replacement for Windows and GCJ [gnu.org] should be interchangeable with the Sun JVM. I respect both of these efforts but the fact is that they are not in control of the specs they are implementing.
In the case of Silverlight there's no compelling reason to move from standards we have to this new specification.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because HTML is intended to present information and not identical images. You can pretty much guarrantee that any two randomly chosen renderings are different - different resolution, different colour settings, different fonts, different font-sizes, different browser width, different personal style sheets, different browsers. But provided setups are the same then browsers should not render differently.
I bet if you look on WindowsXP and Mac iPhone you don't get the _same_ rendering. If you do then it's broken as an information display medium.
What I want to know is what benefits do we have if we use Silverlight over using Flash, say, or other established standards for preparing webpages.
Re:Show us where it says Mono is patent proof. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point! I'd better go patch out the MS Word support for OpenOffice.
There's also two other issues here: Some countries do not allow software patents. For the rest of us, there is still the question of "What's a sane alternative?" No matter where you go in the software industry, you'll be running into patents.
All that said, I do actually agree that it's maybe not the safest move, and that I would much rather start from scratch.
Oh, on a related note: Remember the whole GIF controversy? For quite a long time, the only reasonable alternative was to use JPEGs everywhere, because it was either GIF or JPEG. It took a long time for PNG to be widely supported enough to be a replacement for GIF, and various ways of animating PNGs aren't really officially standardized, and are certainly not commonly supported.
So, at a certain point, you have to ask yourself if you'll actually have a completely open replacement created by the time the patent runs out.