Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It's not about competing with Flash because there is no direct revenue to be gained from that, it's another way to make the web experience slightly more complete on a Windows Machine over the competition.
I figured it was more about "control" over content than the viewing platform, but you may be right.
Hence why "proper" Silverlight is currently only available on MS platforms (and OSX) and the OSS Moonlight for other platforms is feature incomplete. They do know that in order to displace flash they need to offer "something" for Linux but this doesn't really display any level of acceptance I can see in a positive light.
Having full cross-platform support on Flash vs partial "it might work, it might not" on others isn't something I see selling well to developers, though. If we were only talking about Windows vs Linux I'd worry, but Flash is well supported on many non-Windows platforms (phones, etc). Again if Windows Mobile were the dominant mobile phone platform I'd worry, but it isn't by any stretch.
I haven't used Silverlight much at all, to be fair, nor have I come across it very often (the RyanAir route map being the first time I noticed it). It didn't seem to do anything very "special" as I write this I just thought "maybe that's down to me using Moonlight", so I just tried the same thing on my Windows PC, which being Firefox + Windows 2000 isn't supported at all! It did get me this page though:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx?reason... .. which shows what is/isn't supported; hardly a complete picture right now!
Rest assured that at some point full Silverlight availability will be used to leverage market share of either MS platforms or IE itself, this is the only point of it's existence otherwise what does all this effort net Microsoft ?
With TV stations and Youtube (etc) streaming video through Flash, I think it's control over content that matters to MS, but equally it could be just that Adobe doing "well"[1] at something doesn't sit well with MS; they're not a big fan of PDFs either I think?
[1] I'm no fan of Flash personally, and usually have it disabled or enabled selectively through FlashBlock.
Office for Mac is still going, 2008 was released, 2010 has been announced (now finally with a real Outlook client rather than entourage)
Ah OK, fair enough. I thought I remembered it going, but I don't touch the Mac.
IE was dropped if I remember correctly in response to an agreement between MS and Apple that MS would release Mac versions of IE for as long as Apple didn't produce a competing product. Safari appeared and was made available to Windows machines so no more IE.
Now you say that, I do recall there being an agreement along those lines.
In my opinion this isn't an example of positive acceptance, it is merely phase 2 because ignoring us didn't work. It's a rehash of "this stuff will only work properly on IE/Windows" with a thin varnish of "But look how open we are to interoperability this time, it's not our fault OSS can't keep up"
I can see them trying that, but realistically Linux/FOSS is no longer small enough to be brushed aside that way. (FOSS is more pervasive than just Linux, of-course; Firefox is relevant here, and I'm sure Flash works fine on Opera, Chrome (Windows, but will do on Linux when released), etc.
There doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to use Silverlight at the moment, and I can't see one that doesn't include wide mu;lti-platform support.
Moonlight is currently at Silverlight 1.0, Moonlight 2.0 (compatible with Silverlight 2.0) is in pre-release. Silverlight 3.0 was released in July and not currently even on Moonlight's roadmap. So already the OSS version lags the Silverlight spec by 2 releases. Therefore some things will only work properly on genuine Silverlight (several of the things I tried on the MS showcase included) Hence my comment about lip service only. For the full experience you need to be running Windows or intel OSX, I am not sure what Apple did to deserve official releases but I am guessing there was a monopoly clause in there somewhere. Therefore (b) still exists and now it can be spun to be OSS's fault.
I'd expect the apps on MS showcase to fail - even to be specifically tweaked to break Moonlight. But are there many real-world Silverlight apps out there that fail in Moonlight? I have no idea, I've only ever found one app at all!
I think we need both a official black box build of Silverlight that is at the current spec and a community re-implementation (Moonlight) or as I said if MS were serious about cross platform support with no traps then Silverlight itself would have been open. The latter will never happen because of the reasons stated above.
I agree Silverlight won't be opened, but that's more because MS just doesn't work that way. they'd have got far further with it (commercially as much as anything else) if they'd open sourced it to start with - that would *really* have wrong-footed Adobe. That's how Google would have played it, but MS is too set in its ways for that.
If Silverlight becomes too great a threat, Adobe will doubtless open-source it. Imagine that - if the licence was suitable it could be built-in to browsers like Firefox and that would have to be an effective way to compete with MS!