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.'"
I'm surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
News flash! (Score:5, Interesting)
Film at 11.
Seriously? Wouldn't it be a bit more suspect if the *didn't* use it?
Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:5, Interesting)
-Rick
More anti-competitive behavior? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News flash! (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, this will only effect me when someone points out something stupid Microsoft did on their sight and I get to check it out for a good laugh. Those who are Windows users are mostly clueless of how they are being manipulated and attempts to open their eyes regarding this is pretty useless. But I still try every now and then.
LoB
Re:I'm surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
The semi platform independence of Flash is actually pretty good. It's available on the Nokia N810 which runs Linux and has an ARM CPU. Not exactly a PC-like device.
And that's without mentioning the open source implementations.
So, Microsoft, please provide a very compatible, well supported implementation of Silverlight on the Nokia N810 and a couple of other similar devices and we will consider it. If not, why bother? Flash is ubiquitous, works well and is becoming less proprietary every year if I believe the news.
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Silverlight 1.1 is based on the
You gain all of the advantages of the
It's not perfect, by any means, but it is still a very young product. But 2008 could be a really great year for it. And in the mean time, it still makes a killer foundation for controlled environment deployments.
-Rick
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft's plan is to replace Flash as the Flashy web UI of choice. As a UI developer, I am ambivalent. I fail to see how being in Adobe's pocket is any better or worse than being in Microsoft's. Actually, I prefer Silverlight as it does not require that hideously expensive Flex dev environment.
Re:Firefox... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wether Microsoft likes or not, the world isn't all Windows anymore; and no, running on Windows and OS X is only 'technically' cross-platform. HTML/Javascript/Ajax IS cross-platform. I do a lot of my surfing on my iPhone, many people now do that on their PS3, or using mobile Opera. Make technology that doesn't work on all mobile platforms at your own peril, IMHO.
Re:Firefox... (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, it's a problem. I rarely run Windows myself, and pretty much never use IE. However, I support both Windows XP desktops and Windows 2003 servers, so I often have to use Microsoft's Knowledge Base. The KB already breaks a little in non-IE browsers (which is insanely stupid), but if they put it in Silverlight, it will become inaccessible to me.
I think this is a shitty thing to do to your customers. They're going to punish me for using some of their products but not all of their products. Since I'm not going to use all of their products, this is exactly the sort of move that makes me want to get rid of them entirely, and run a completely Linux/OSX office.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't like Ms but I do like silver light , especially their promise of it running well on linux and well on every platform. Java at times can get heavy and slow down even the biggest servers.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Interesting)
Miquel de Icaza is working on an open-source version of Silverlight for Linux. See here [gcn.com].
Microsoft wants to make HTML irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft plans to use its website to push Silverlight technology adoption.
I remember when MSDN and other Microsoft sites were available only with IE. This was bad for who worked on Linux or used Netscape/Firefox but had to support Windows hosts. They finally changed their sites to be standard compliant (or at least, closer to that).
Now that they're losing market to Firefox and they're having to go standards compliant on HTML, they'll try to push a "better" technology to try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly.
If you look at it, OOXML is just the same, its integration with Sharepoint is another try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly on the web.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Silverlight is cross-platform and supported, because Microsoft will always own the format, lead its development, and introduce new incompatible features. Everyone will have to keep following them forever, not to mention that probably they'll start adding patented features or DRM. They've been doing this with every program and file format they have.
Re:Firefox... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They're already spamming us (Score:3, Interesting)
If Microsoft's dominance had anything to do with software quality and not with barely legal tactics of coercing OEMs into bundling their and their software only, sabotaging Windows so it would not work properly with DR-DOS, and generally abusing one monopoly to create more monopolies, your comment would have some measure of correctness.
WFWG made obvious (to Novell's disgrace) people didn't want file servers - they wanted to share files and printers. Excel was respectable. Word (first on Mac, then on Windows) was decent. Multiplan and Word were even honest products on DOS and on Macintosh. Windows brought some GUI multitasking for those who couldn't afford to run Unix and X. I did a lot of Applesoft BASIC code during college.
Unfortunately, the real world is not like that. This Microsoft is not the same company it was on the 70s, 80s and early 90s.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Interesting)
We went to a full-day demo on Silverlight, given by a Microsoft developer. What they did in about 500 lines of Silverlight code was a pretty nice picture slideshow with smooth image transitions. What we did in about 500 lines of Flex was equivalent, but supported images of any size, allowed you to zoom in, supported a film strip mode, and carousel mode, as well as the standard fade-in, fade-out image transitions. Ours also is able to attach to ANY other language that is capable of delivering web services in a wide variety of formats (XMLRPC, SOAP, WSDL, flat XML, etc), and it only requires 1 line of code to change (or a switch statement if we wanted to support them all at once). Ours is more featureful, easier to read, understand, and maintain than the very best that Microsoft could produce in the same amount of code. It also performs better.
Seriously, I have seen both of these things in action, Silverlight is a long, LONG way away from being able to compete with Flex on both an install base perspective as well as an ease-of-development perspective. There is a reason people aren't adopting Silverlight, and install base is only a small part of it (though of course it itself is significant).
Microsoft is doing their usual bang-up job of supporting the minimal features to look competitive, then cramming it down people's throats until they forget there are better options out there. And well they should, they should be scared silly. Flex is poised to overthrow the desktop monopoly in a way that AJAX and Google Apps can't (wouldn't be surprised to see some Google apps on Flex in the future). To boot, you can convert these browser-based apps to offline desktop apps with about 30 minutes of work, and an Apollo redistributable.
Nothing has been this big of a threat to the desktop monopoly since Java. And Adobe has the gumption, power, and pocketbook to follow through. This is the source of the recent interest in Flash 9 on Linux. They don't care whether Linux users can view pretty animations, they care whether Linux users accept Flex, and being given access to Flex is the first step toward acceptance. They are also courting the open source community more and more (notice that the Flash Remoting spec was recently opened, which is actually a pretty big deal since it enables features that only they are able to deliver today), realizing I think that a lot of these Linux geeks are also IT decision makers.
Adobe is working on a version of Photoshop for the web, which from what I understand will be a combination of HTML/Ajax, Flex, and server-side processing. They are bringing levels of desktop functionality to the browser never before possible, and it has Microsoft bricking in their pants.
Over the coming months, expect to see Microsoft cramming Silverlight down your and anyone else's throat as rigorously as they are able to. It will be hidden in Windows Update files, it will be required to do various things on the Microsoft website, it will be bundled with software. They will make many applications in Silverlight which are better suited to other existing technologies (for example, the Microsoft website!!), because they want to make it as mandatory as they can without hitting anti-trust legislation.
Re:bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Mono isn't a development environment, it's a runtime and a compiler. The development environment for Mono is called MonoDevelop, and in my experience, people have a much easier time getting started with it than XCode, Eclipse, or NetBeans.
On a system where Java is installed, [blah blah blah Java is wonderful blah blah blah]
So, why do you think people are using Mono? I'll tell you: just about every Mono developer knows Java and found it wanting. That's why people are developing in Mono in the first place. Maybe Mono isn't going to "win", but there's no going back to Java for many people; personally, I'd rather program in plain C.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:2, Interesting)
While MonoDevelop currently isn't comparable to MS Visual Studio, I very much hope that it will be in the future. Mostly because developing in VS is a breeeze compared to everything else I've tried, and I really don't want to run Windows anymore. Also, part of MS Windows popularity has to be because of the comparatively easy-to-learn programming tools that have always been coming out of Redmond, and thus generated droves of home-hacked apps with at least somewhat nice user interfaces. Maybe a something similar could happen to Linux if the set of available development tools were better.