Lets keep in mind exactly what Microsoft does. They throw a ton of money and developers at some product and make a lot of noise about how this is their next big thing. Then they seem to completely or mostly drop it and they're off to the next thing.
My fear and source of consternation is their sudden "love of html5". Yeah, they're currently doing good on getting IE up to spec. Even though its still not 100% there, but that's ok since its in beta. When its officially released, it will matter then. What I firmly believe is going to happen is that IE9 is going to get released and will get the occasional security patch, but they're going to stop doing major development on it and again the MS browser will stagnate for years again.
So everyone should stop getting excited when Microsoft says they're doing this one thing or another. Apple keeps its cards close to the chest and stays focused on what they're building. Microsoft is the guy at the table that always goes 'Hey guys, wow look at this King/Ace I have! Now look at my pocket Queens!'
Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond?
Right on. This is exactly why I started to actively avoid consulting gigs where I'd have to work with Microsoft technologies - whatever knowledge you gain has a shelf life measured in weeks, because they're constantly on to the next shiny trinket.
OK, 17 years ago. I learned Windows NT internals, and the Windows message pump, etec... Almost all of it still is useful today. Probably the only big discontinuity has been .NET, which has been going strong now for about 8 years.
All the technology is pretty much incremental built on top of those two. I find it more daunting to keep with video game controllers than I do software development technology, whether on or off the MS stack. Not that I know everything, but I've never felt like I'd wasted my time learning anything related to software tools.
Microsoft also has a habit of constantly changing the names and market positioning of everything, which can make it seem more mercurial than it is. (Not that they haven't had their share of truly ephemeral Next Big Things as well.)
I'm kind of curious... really what were the MS technologies that you spent more than 15 minutes on(reading a Dr.Dobbs article) learning that went poof?
I've learned over the years:
Win32
Visual C/C++
COM
.NET
C#
WPF
T-SQL
JScript
ASP.NET
Direct3D
Visual Studio (the IDE)
Windows Services
I literally can't point to a book on my bookshelf that is related to MS technology and say, "that was a waste".
ODBC and OLEDB are still pretty widely used if you work in the DB space. They just shipped a new version of ODBC last year. And given that ODBC has been out for nearly 20 years, I'd hardly call that something that went poof overnight. I probably see new OLEDB at least once a week.
ADO.NET is extremely popular still. I'd argue that its the most popular way to get data in the MS stack to this very day.
Hailstorm didn't go poof, it was never released. Passport actually still lives on to this day, but is called Windows Live ID. VB6 is the only one on your list that I'd legitimately say isn't really used much, but that line of VB lived for 11 years -- that's not exactly a short lifespan -- it may well out live Java :-)
And WPF doesn't appear to be on the verge of going anywhere. Visual Studio was just rewritten with it. Their designer tool, Blend, is written in it. They just built their new IDE for business apps with it. If you saw at PDC they announced support for fixing Airspace issues (a huge engineering task), SL support, improved threading, integrating new controls, among other things.
What happened to fail early and fail often? Just because they're a huge corporation doesn't mean they're not allowed to try to change the world with a new idea which might fail. They just have the money to try a bit longer before giving up than most companies.
I think Microsoft does chase a lot of new shiny things. But they're really giving what the devs are asking for. I know, I'm one of those .Net developers :)
I don't think ADO.NET belongs in that category. Even though it's not the primary method of data access in modern .NET software, to my knowledge everything else is built on top of it, and it's useful if you have some understanding of what's going on underneath the hood.
More than any other software dev I know, they seem to constantly be trumpeting that "this is a complete ground-up rewrite!" as if that were a good thing every time.
You need a more complete history of Microsoft to know the full story.
Back in the early DirectX days (1996), Microsoft was working on a technology called Chrome Effects that was intended to compete with VRML as the world's ultimate "Networkable Graphics" format. This history is covered in books such as <em>Renegades of the Empire</em>. This was stuff from back when Michael Abrash worked at Microsoft!
I remember reading about that in Boot (lol) magazine. At the time they said it would run on a 300mhz P2 and I was floored that it would take so much processing power. :)
"Interviewer: "HTML or Silverlight, what is Microsoft's lead strategy for developing rich internet applications? Silverlight, HTML5, or acquiring Adobe?"
Ballmer: "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question, the world is going HTML5... The world is just pushing down that HTML5 path, and so are we... What we've really done [with Silverlight] in very good ways is to repurpose it as an important part of the client platform, so yes, you will embrace HTML5, but it's also clear people want client apps... So we're dedicated to Silverlight, but with a little different concept, and we're embracing HTML5."
HTML5 support on the windows phone would mean Windows phone devs could support other phones, and would unify the market. Fracturing it helps increase the value of niche apps, while unification would only level the playing field and leave the windows phone at a disadvantage.
That's the sort of strategy that works when you're a dominant player. WP7 needs to go the other way, making it possible to write cross-platform apps, so that devs will say, "Ooh, here's a better to make my next app!" instead of, "Eww, do I really want to support yet another platform?".
Microsoft acts like it is the dominant player because most of its employees genuinely believe it's a question of time for their inherently superior technology becomes dominant.
It also means that WinPhone7 users won't have access to a rapidly growing library of HTML5 content. That's quite a disadvantage for a nascent mobile platform, especially now that HTML5 = mobile web thanks to widespread support from Android and iDevices, among others.
I cannot see them giving up client-Side Silverlight that easily; controlling the whole stack is an advantage for them just as it is for Adobe (if Flash is king, Adobe sells tons of developer tools, and possibly licenses on mobile devices) or Oracle (with java).
So, I expect their strategy is to have a full Silverlight path where supported, with a fallback to HTML/SVG/Canvas when needed. If so, Windows 7 Phone phones would currently have more need for a good Silverlight implementation than for good/full HTML5 support.
If Windows 7 Phone phones manage to gain traction, the business strategy could then well be to decrease effort on the HTML5 fallback path.
Has everyone forgotten that the iPhone didn't support copy-paste, at first?
Edit: [completing my thought]
Apple was ridiculed for it, though; however, it's more evidence that the phone isn't 100% complete, and that Microsoft wants a tool out there to show the world what they've made. Perhaps then, as requests are made concerning the phone, they'll incorporate those, not to mention adding features they, themselves want. (It won't take long to want copy-paste).
As a second thought I had while extending this post. Startups are encouraged to release early and release often. Releasing early, I imagine, comes with "releasing a not 100% complete and not even completely polished" subtext to it), why are large corporations slammed for it? I thought we praise companies like Google because they similar to a startup, and yet we scoff at companies like Microsoft when they may very well be doing something similar. Admittedly, I've not followed Windows Phone 7 very closely, as I'm pleased with my current smart phone (Droid original), so perhaps they've not alluded to this being the end-all, be-all for their phone. Given how XP came to be, though, we really should be prepared for their original version to not be perfect, and it take a few (free) updates to get it up to something very good.
So long as I'm rambling, I should add that, if carriers start modding the heck out of the operating system to the point that a user can't download the patches that Microsoft comes out with, producing an incomplete product is a very, very bad idea for them (or maybe for the carriers) -- but I don't want to start the carriers versus phone-makers versus software-developers war, again.
End my two cents on things related to the subject.
I feel bad for the MS devs, but from a consumer perspective, this is how it works:
It's 2010. If you start a television production company today, you won't come out with a black and white CRT using the excuse "has everyone forgotten that Panasonic didn't support color HD TVs at first?"
You have a point, though I would liken this lack of a feature to something more like "this blu ray player can't connect to the internet via WPA2." It's not entirely essential to its operation, and an upgrade could be around the corner.
[Hacker News bug report: I had to come to treeface's comment page to reply to this message. I wasn't allowed to on the main thread]
Most likely it was the time it took you to go to his comments page that made the difference. When comment threads reach a certain level of activity, the HN software starts putting a delay before you can reply. I believe it's meant to curb useless chatter and flamewars.
I meant I feel bad for them because they're expected to crank out an Android/iOS competitor in an unreasonably short period of time. For some of them, this is probably the crowning achievement of their programming careers, yet people like us are sitting around complaining because they don't have a feature that took iOS developers quite a long time to bring to market.
I certainly don't feel bad for them in a general sense. They're probably paid pretty well and I would imagine they have an otherwise great working environment.
Gotcha, that's cool. Sorry, I miss-read your comment.
I just think it's time we start to view C# with a bit more respect/understanding. It's a great language and Anders Hejlsberg doesn't get enough credit for what he's done (and is doing) as C# continues to evolve; ditto Miguel and the Mono team..
MS devs deserve sympathy for the shortsightedness of their managers, who thought that Windows Mobile was good enough for a market that they didn't know was competitive. Micorsoft's developers may have been handed an awfully short timeline for Windows Phone 7, but the company as a whole had plenty of warning.
Won't everyone just end up using Opera Mobile/Mini or whatever other mobile browsers become available for Windows Phone 7 instead of the default if it doesn't meet expectations? None of the serious users of the current types of Windows Mobile phones I know use the crippled versions of IE they contain. I know this is supposedly an entirely new idea, I still see this happening.. especially when customers will expect browsers as nice as iOS, Android, WebOS, Maemo, and even newer Blackberries...
Does it however strategically affect WP7's strategic future?
Look, the way I see it, WP7 is barely months (weeks?) old. To expect HTML5 support when 'HTML5' is in still flux is silly. MS are still working on their desktop support for goodness sake.
Lack of copy-and-paste demonstrates clearly that MS couldn't get everything in to v1.0. And to impute strategic motives is reaching.
The fact that Microsoft is still working on desktop HTML5 doesn't mean a thing to a smartphone customer when every other popular smartphone has it already.
For the same reason, it's hard to convince myself that I'm being "silly" for having an expectation as a web developer that a new mobile OS platform in 2010 would have decent HTML5 support. What a step backwards for the mobile web.
I'm not following Phone7 closely enough to have noticed that. So, if the absence of HTML5 is not a "strategic" decision what is it?
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but it strikes me as being a completely barking decision. The world and its developers' army is writing for HTML5, especially in the mobile space. Folk are openly talking about dedicated apps going the way of the dodo, and that's because of what HTML5 brings. Sure it may not all be here today, but get the weight of the World's developers behind you and, frankly, nothing is going to stop it.
I do expect WP7 to support HTML5. I'm utterly amazed that it doesn't.
Does Microsoft really believe that it is bigger than the Internet, the mobile space, and all those that develop for it? Has it lost its way so totally and utterly? Has it lost its marbles?
> Does Microsoft really believe that it is bigger than the Internet, the mobile space, and all those that develop for it? Has it lost its way so totally and utterly? Has it lost its marbles?
IMO, windsurfer didn't 'point out' anything - he/she speculated as to why WP7 didn't emerge from the womb with HTML5 support, and expressed the speculation more as an assertion of fact.
The problem is that they're unwilling to jump on WebKit. I imagine this might have something to do with the historical prominence of the IE team at Microsoft.
Using WebKit (and possibly even the JS-processing code Google pushes back to the WebKit community), they could get it up and running in far less time than it would take to build it themselves. A small (or large, well-organized) company wouldn't have legacy issues like this (or at least wouldn't let them get in the way of making the right decision).
The problem is that if they use Webkit, there will be a unified and cross-platform environment for deploying web applications. Microsoft cannot allow that - one of its strengths is how difficult it is to migrate to other platforms whatever was developed to be deployed to Windows.
The only reason Windows has a browser these days is that Microsoft succeeded in destroying Netscape, but, by the time they did it, it was too late to destroy the web. Had they arrived at the game when NCSA Mosaic was the dominant browser and succeeded in fragmenting the transport and presentation layers with competing protocols and formats, the web would be completely different today.
They don't even have a desktop browser that doesn't suck yet - it's in beta. I agree it'd be nice if WP7 had a better browser, but it's not a very realistic demand at this point.
Have you used the mobile browser? It's probably the best implementation of any mobile browser I've used, bar none. HTML5 would be a big plus -- the only problem is I can't think of any webpages that I go to that use HTML5 (although I'm sure there are plenty that exist).
This doesn't make much sense, it's their phone software. All they have to do is leverage their own browser tech for IE9 for their phone. It may not be easy, but if you can't get all the legs walking in the same direction in your own company, why should people have faith in your ability to deliver a good user experience.
...Okay. IE9, which supports HTML5, is still in beta. WP7 has already been released, and I'm sure the folks in Redmond is working on the next release/updates. Do you get it now?
...Okay. It's not an easy job to align products and release cycles. Microsoft was already late on WP7. They probably missed a cycle and Android kicked in. Microsoft doesn't want to be late anymore. Meaning, they probably couldn't wait for IE9 for mobile to be released (which wouldn't be a HUGE job if you have a working, stable, and RC version of IE9).
In conclusion, Microsoft is being smart that they release the phone and let people dive/absorb/digest earlier instead of waiting for full featured phone OS with a HTML5 supported browser, which is still in beta for desktops. However, this just means..the next release of WP7 will be very interesting. Remember, Android and iPhone OS (which wasn't iOS at the time) weren't closed to feature complete with their first release. I'm an Android user, and I can remember when I first bought my Droid, it went through so many updates software updates. Companies just have to cut things if one or two things will block the entire release.
"All they have to do" is take a hardware accelerated Vista/Windows 7 application (IE9) designed for mice and port it to much weaker hardware with a different OS and multi-touch. That's not easy.
Their brand new phone is of course using the most stable browser they have, and their brand new browser supporting HTML5 is of course not the most stable browser they have.
In a perfect world they would have shipped the phone with WebKit, but we all know that Microsoft is not going to do that (I'd love to be proven wrong).
Here's what I suspect their strategic angle on this is:
I think when MSFT talks about HTML5, what they tend to mean by it is web applications with desktop-like rich UIs, fancy graphics (that, in particular, require hardware acceleration on powerful PCs to run smoothly), etc. They have decided it's in their interest to encourage the proliferation of such applications (expect to see a lot of tools to help this along - Microsoft have already released an Adobe Illustrator plug in to export to HTML <canvas> (http://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/) and Blend 5 is strongly rumored to support SVG/<canvas> as a target platform) for two reasons:
1. They think it's a chance to differentiate their web properties, especially by moving them toward a rich-client model in which they already have experience. They tried to do that with Silverlight previously but didn't get enough acceptance from various quarters. They probably think it's an opportunity for their development tools business as well (in particular, <canvas> being a low level API leaves a lot of room for new frameworks on top of it).
2. If rich-UI, CPU/GPU-hungry HTML5 sites become common, people who haven't upgraded in a while will need newer browsers and PCs to view them correctly. Of course, Microsoft is hoping to encourage them to move to IE9 and therefore to Windows 7, but even if they go to another browser instead, if they're on older computers they'll still need to upgrade their PC for the sites to run well, regardless of what browser they're using, and by default that means moving to a W7/8/ ... machine. I think this is probably the most important consideration for them.
> Just because XP is their most popular OS doesn't mean that they need to keep supporting it.
Ballmer said "we're embracing HTML5". If they want to embrace this technology then yes, they do need to bring it to their older, more popular OSs. Otherwise, they're just putting in a halfassed, minimal effort to it.
All other HTML5 browsers run on Windows XP. Microsoft is the only company to produce an HTML5 browser that doesn't run on the world's most widely used OS, which happens to be made by them.
Since none of them are made by Microsoft, very few corporations will use them. This means that many web developers will still be developing for IE8 in the year 2020.
You have a point, but at the same time MS have no obligation to pander to these hyper-conservative corporations in a way that makes no business sense for them. Perhaps they should promote usage of Chrome on XP ;-)
Now, can you seriously sit there and tell me it's reasonable for MS to sell an OS for ten more years (totaling about 20 years!) without releasing a single HTML5 capable browser for it?
And then comment that they're "embracing" HTML5? Ridiculous.
It will, they just focused on UI and development ecosystem first and I'm sure the updated mobile IE will be a derivative of IE9 which isn't complete yet.
So mobile Safari 3.0 (looks like the best candidate for 'three years ago') supported all of HTML5? Really? Googling shows that safari 3.0 for Windows certainly didn't support HTML5. Did mobile safari 3 support '2010 HTML5', given that it's still in draft at the moment. Has 'HTML5' remained the same for 3 years?
What has safari for windows to do with Mobile Safari? If fact there were features that first were released on Mobile Safari, and only later came to Safari on OS X (hardware accelerated CSS transforms and animations).
As for "all of HTML5" — no current browser AFAIK has support for full HTML 4.
The company who should fear this turn is Adobe. This is the exact opposite of "market validation" for Flash.
This is a competitor signalling that they are no longer betting on a Rich (binary) environment in a browser. They see that as a dead-end, and have undoubtedly spent considerable time, money, and effort coming to that conclusion.
It's still dangerous to them. They are the de-facto standard for Flash creation tools, but there is a much larger ecosystem for HTML5/Javascript tools. Even discounting existing HTML5/Javascript tool users who may or may not have a grudge against Adobe for Flash you still have to expect a significant amount of currently-Flash devs during the transition.
Indeed, I'm referring to the Flash tool, not the Flash runtime which is obviously free. But, the investment in getting the Flash runtime everywhere is what makes the platform valuable, and therefore what makes the tool worth using.
But, I agree with you that if they pivot they should be fine. To some extent they're also (smartly) re-purposing their existing tools for native mobile development: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/packagerforiphone/
I'm skeptical that they'll be big in the "good HTML5/JavaScript tools" business based on what they have[n't] done with Dreamweaver, HomeSite, ColdFusion, etc. They just don't seem to have a lot of developer momentum there, IMHO.
But assuming Adobe makes money from the tools, doesn't this just open up the field for them. AND it relieves them of the cost of having to maintain and update the runtime. Now they can really just focus on the tooling. MS, Apple, Mozilla, and Google focus on the runtime (browser).
If seems like if Adobe plays their cards right, they end up making a lot more money, although they become a lot less prominent brand.
Sure, it could. But, if you're talking about competing over HTML/JavaScript-type tools, the market there is awfully crowded, and most of the competition is free.
1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash.
2) Flash is ActionScript, and ActionScript is for all intents and purposes "EcmaScript-NG". JavaScript is becoming ActionScript. Adobe got all the predictions right, and EcmaScript is headed that way (I see type-annotations in your js-future :-) and because ActionScript ~= JavaScript, it would be very easy for them to convert to "HTML5", whatever that might become. This is such a trivial exercise, it's done several times a day, js ports of flax libraries.
3) We have already seen CSS3 "IDEs", and you have GWT, Aptana, etc. It's the "HTML5" scene that's going the old Flash way, by integrating development and tools, projectifying scripts, and becoming more organized.
"1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash."
Exactly, people talk about "flash being slow", but the competence is even slower when they try to make what flash does well(drawing vector shapes videos).
E.g when the OSS community tried to make animated svg or flash videos, they discovered their performance was simply awful compared to flash(the two guys that created it were not idiots after all).
MS tried with silverlight not to do difficult things with vectors like flash does, and use hardware acceleration at the maximum level so nobody notice how poor their performance is. The same strategy of metro on win7 of "not trying to do what computers are not good for(translation: our employees don't know/don't want to do the hard work it takes to compete with flash, as computers improve we try to make the minimum effort, and use marketing to compete) "
Sorry if this sounds stupid, but how is Javascript becoming ActionScript? To name a few major differences: the OO architectures are very different and Javascript doesn't compile.
Might be more accurate to say that Javascript was becoming ActionScript - ActionScript 3 was based on a draft standard for EcmaScript 4, which at the time of AS3's creation looked set to become JavaScript 2.0, but that didn't end up panning out.
It's my understanding that Adobe has every intention of remaining a superset of EcmaScript. If ES breaks AS3 compatibility in the future, it's safe to expect that Adobe will keep pace.
FWIW, for much of its documentation, Adobe refers to the EcmaScript specification. In fact, Flash instructions map 1:1 to EcmaScript specs, including the type conversion and promotion algorithms.
ActionScript is a superset of JavaScript with syntactic sugar. All the "differences", mostly type annotations, class-based oop, and traits, are superficial and do not modify the language to any reasonable degree. Every ECMAScript program is also a valid ActionScript 3 program.
What do you mean "javascript doesn't compile"? if you mean it doesn't have a native ahead-of-time compiler for an existing physical processor, well, that's not a language problem but a community/effort problem :-)
I agree with you in general about the similarities between the two languages, but I haven't seen any movement from one to the other regarding the differences. I simply meant to address your comment regarding JS becoming AS.
Re: compilation...sorry..that's exactly what I meant :-]. As far as I know, you can't open a prompt in a Flash app and code AS on the fly like you can in Javascript. I don't consider this a problem...I actually prefer JS to AS.
How about if Adobe helped make the decision in the first place? Let's say, Adobe realized Flash is on its last legs, that Apple hate them and their engineering staff have much greater alignment with Microsoft than any other platform. Now let's say the call up Microsoft and say, hey, how about you buy us and put our engineers to work building kick ass H5 dev tools.
At the same time, Microsoft realized that like Flash, Silverlight will never achieve universal penetration, hence why developers are reluctant to use it on the web. Microsoft, seeing Adobe having similar issues and spats with Apple think, hey, what if we bought Adobe and put all the Flash engineers on H5.
So Microsoft is still a gargantuan hydra with different heads fighting each other?
It's fairly fascinating. On the one hand, you get this sensible, open Microsoft - the company that still delivers reasonably good Desktop products, has a great development platform, wonderful developer resources/support, now supports HTML5. On the other hand, you keep encountering its evil twin: the institution that made the Kin, that scrapped Courier, that can't decide which horse to back in the internet race, that made IE7, and so on and so forth; the company that will end up losing most of its mind and market share to the new (and old, actually) kids on the block.
I think it's really weird that people point to cancelling the Courier project as an example of a bad decision - all we ever saw from it were some leaked concept videos! Without knowing the actual state the project was in - it might've been a huge mess, as the Kin was - surely it's impossible to have any insight into the wisdom of continuing it.
It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?
If everyone was using Silverlight today I suspect they wouldn't be saying the same thing. Instead it has virtually no traction among devs (aside from a core group of hardcore Microsoft boosters), it has little legitimacy, and the smartphone explosion has rendered it dangerous to choose.
If Flash is a relic of the past (true), then Silverlight is a relic that didn't even have relevance in the past.
It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?
I really wish this was all there is to it, but their behavior doesn't qualify as adaptive and pragmatic as far as I'm concerned. It qualifies as aimless and schizophrenic.
It's one thing to suggest, fail and then drop technology. Google does that. Even new Apple does that from time to time. It's another thing to suggest, fail and then keep developing technology in some state of semi-cancellation while backing a completely different approach at the same time: for instance, Silverlight. Right now, it seems like a classic case of throwing stuff at walls and seeing what sticks. That's part of the reason why Microsoft is struggling in any area except for its core business.
I don't know that Silverlight is in any state of semi-cancellation, they're just now promoting it mainly for desktop and mobile apps instead of for web apps.
Right, but you have to take another step back. As you say, it's good that Microsoft moved away from Silverlight because it didn't gain traction and was wrong for the market.
But before we laud them for moving away from yet another high-profile flop, why didn't it gain traction? Why was it wrong for the market? Because it failed to learn the lessons of the past. It is yet another not-invented-here, one-stack-to-rule-them-all product from Microsoft. It needed developer mindshare and it was going against an entrenched competitor in Flash.
Why was it even begun, amounting to a massive waste of developer time, money, and opportunity cost? That's the real problem at the core of Microsoft. Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, failed projects pad manager resumes on 1 Microsoft Way.
My theory is they wanted some way to get a bit of return on investment from WPF and thus WPF/E which became Silverlight. In 2007 or so who was to know that Apple would have the clout to almost singlehandedly drown RIAs in the bathtub.
Silverlight is really just a pared-down, more portable, and somewhat decruftified version of the .net framework. They probably figured it would be valuable to have such a thing even if the initial "browserplugin" usecase didn't pan out. And in fact it has been.
I would say resources to learning silverlight would be a big reason it hasn't gained traction. After the basics it's a real struggle to work out how to do a heap of things, the answers usually seem to be buried in blogs and comments if at all.
I find MSDN equally hard to work out for other technologies as well, but at least there are other resources out there, with silverlight sometimes the only mention of a feature existing is on a developer blog.
HTML 5 is still in a draft state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
Looks like it will be in IE9.
So whats all this about Microsoft not adopting open standards?
Their kind of a big company isn't it okay for them to support both?
Is it possible for developers to see this merely as microsoft positioning everything to be more like apple?
I'm seeking some validation if the following is now true:
wpf ~~ cocoa (for mac)
silverlight ~~ cocoa touch
html5 (formerly SL when used as webapps) ~~ html5.
I hope microsoft pitches the above this way, so developers like me that need to use their tech stack can sleep easy at night. It's a simpler way to think about everything. And Flash can still have it's place for RIA and grow to be a premier tools developer for html5 apps.
Remember, apple originally took an opposite direction when the iphone first came out, originally expecting developers to develop mobile html applications for the phone. That idea died quickly, and a year later Cocoa Touch and the App Store came out.
It's not quite that simple, because Silverlight is for desktop apps as well, and there are also the Windows native APIs (which are strongly rumored to be getting an overhaul in 8).
This is smart competitive positioning by Microsoft. Microsoft has been burned in the past for not embracing standards early and clearly wants to be on the right path from the outset. The difference this time around is that HTML5 also presents itself as a competitive option to the proprietary iOS and Flash platforms, to which Microsoft offers no significant or competitive alternative.
This looks like a classic case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Despite how much Apple raves about HTML5, the fact remains that the bane for the App store are HTML5 apps.
Microsoft has just raised the stakes a bit...but as many commenters have pointed out, time will tell whether or not they have staying power. They have a tendency to wax and wane on their support for products.
Microsoft is really the last company anybody should be looking for guidance on Internet technologies. Their strategy has historically been to make web development as difficult as possible, so as to delay the eventual replacement of the PC as a computing paradigm. Microsoft only stays in business if the PC paradigm lingers, and lingers...
I find it ironic that just two months ago the same pundits were talking about how WPF was dead and Silverlight is taking over. Now Silverlight is dead and HTML5 is taking over. Yet in MS most high profile product, WP7, it supports Silverlight, but not HTML5.
Why do I get the feeling that most people have no clue WTF they're talking about? :-)
Why? On the intranet you're likely dictating the browser/technology used anyways. Why not simply use what's best for the specific job. If it's Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, rich client app, virtual machine, etc...
So I should not use the best tool for the job, and give up say 5x productivity, in the fear that some company will take me hostage -- especially since AFAIK, this has never happened. And if it has happened it has happened an order of magnitude less frequently as projects getting killed by using the wrong tools.
That I've seen happen first hand, including as recently as last year.
I've been writing a Silverlight app at my job for the past 8 months. I don't feel like Silverlight has given me any kind of productivity boost. I actually find Silverlight to be rather heavyweight and slow going, especially RIA Services which is boilerplate central.
I may have a bit of a "grass is greener" outlook, but I do feel my productivity would be higher with a web framework such as RoR. Especially if I was just as good at Ruby/RoR/JS as I am now at C#/Silverlight (I've been using .NET professionaly since its debut)
Then don't use Silverlight. My point wasn't to use SL per se. It was to use the best tool for the job. If you're most productive writing in 6502 assembly and then writing a binary rewriter to convert it to Logo, which you then compile to Javascript, go for it.
Did you consider all factors, when you are so sure about it being the best tool for a job?
Few years ago, there were many people absolutely sure, that creating IE6-only webapps is also best decision. And look today, where that decision got them.
Then don't write any code, because clearly you don't have enough belief that you (or I or whoever) can weigh the various tradeoffs to make the right decision.
Too often the decision masquerading as "best tool for the job" is in reality "the technology I'm fan of".
I really would not want to be the person, who few years since now is responsible for maintenance of some legacy Silverlight application. It is going to be exactly ugly as maintaing IE6 only application today. The difference is, that it is easier to avoid that now.
I really don't know what would make Silverlight best tool today (except for very specialized solutions). No, support in VS does not count.
Well then what would you use? HTML? That's what the guy who said to based their whole new system on Gopher said in 1992.
It's a stupid argument. I mean really a STUPID argument to say "don't use the best tools, use the tools that some random guy on HN says to use". If you can't trust your own judgment I'd quit software development right now. You really just have no business writing code. Because if you can't pick the best tools based on info, how can you pick the right architecture, or pattern, or prioritize which bugs to fix, or which scenarios to support, or which person to marry or when to have kids or when to buy a house.
I hate to be so blunt, but this reminds me of religious zealots who say, "ignore your best evidence... just trust us". Anyone who goes down that path simply has lost all of my respect.
And yes, downvote away. I just have trouble believe someone on a hacking site would say, "don't do what you think is best based on your own due diligence... follow some arbitrary crowd".
As long as your users don't want to use most mobile devices. I'd much rather put out HTML5 apps where possible... intranet apps in particular seem to tend to live for longer than you ever thought possible. But, yeah, it's definitely nice for certain scenarios.
Writing cross-browser "desktop" html/javascript is very painful right now. The mobile world is a beautiful playground because IE isn't a serious player. Now if Microsoft would adopt WebKit for its mobile browsing, then I'd eat my hat.
Layers seemed easier than DOM...until you encountered the bug in Netscape 4 where you couldn't have two layers loading at the same time. I worked on Netcaster for a while, and we had to have a queue of (layer,url) pairs; when each layer was finished loading, its onLoad handler would notify the queue to load the next layer.
Well, I was making an online charity auction app for the United Way silly season with 10-second high bid updates for each of 20 - 30 items being auctioned each day. Average number of concurrent users was ~1000. The app supported IE 5+, NS 4.7 and 6, Phoenix/Firebird and Opera (each of our new acquisitions had its own pet house browser). Updates were through 1-pixel iframes/ilayers, and the whole thing ran on a single-processor P III 800Mhz Lotus Domino R5 server. And believe it or not, the problem child was Opera -- CSS backgrounds just would not colour inside the lines in the current version at the time.
My fear and source of consternation is their sudden "love of html5". Yeah, they're currently doing good on getting IE up to spec. Even though its still not 100% there, but that's ok since its in beta. When its officially released, it will matter then. What I firmly believe is going to happen is that IE9 is going to get released and will get the occasional security patch, but they're going to stop doing major development on it and again the MS browser will stagnate for years again.
So everyone should stop getting excited when Microsoft says they're doing this one thing or another. Apple keeps its cards close to the chest and stays focused on what they're building. Microsoft is the guy at the table that always goes 'Hey guys, wow look at this King/Ace I have! Now look at my pocket Queens!'