Microsoft PR on Silverlight and Standards
While in Chicago attending this years MAX conference, I happened to start talking to someone in my hotels bar. Of course the conversation starts off polity by asking each other why we were both visiting the city. And as soon as I stated that I was a Flash developer attending MAX, the first thing he said was “you should be using Silverlight”. Of course my ears prick up and I feel a slight sense of rage come over me.
It turns out that I had randomly started talking to someone from Microsoft PR, Redmond. Of course my first questions were “why?” and “what advantages does it give me over Flash?”. He then replied, without hesitation, “HD Video”. My jaw drops in shock. I was anticipating a stream on answers of why Silverlight was “the bee’s knees” and now here I am digesting a now outdated advantage of Silverlight.
I inform him of Flash’s ability to play H.264 video to which he replies “oh…”. Upon quizzing him further (in a genuinely curious way) on Silverlights advantages, he simply claims that “a lot of people are excited about it”.
I think it goes to show that Silverlight, in the eyes of Microsoft corp, is nothing more that an answer for Flash’s online video dominance. Dominance being the only thing they seem to care about as the conversation then leads into Windows market share and web standards.
He states “Why should people need to use anything than IE, when other browsers can’t work most web pages correctly?”! Of course, this does sound somewhat logical, but to a developer, it makes your eyes turn red and steam come out of our ears. I try to explain to him about the browser wars, W3 and that WebKit/Sarari is the most compliant HTML viewer today. He doen’t seem very interested and goes on to mention Windows market share about four to five times more. It does seems that the MS kool aid is of the utmost potent.
I then go onto make digs about “The WOW starts now” and Vista being the new Windows ME. He tells me to check out Engadget in the morning for new the Zune and then he calls it an evening.
No wonder FUD is widespread on the Internet with people like this.
Wow. You didn’t happen to get a photo for Flickr, did you?
jd/adobe
I thing the single strongest advantage Silverlight has on Flash is the ability to play WMV format. It’s not that the format is better then other formats flash (now) renders, as much as the vast amount of video archives out there in the WMV format.
There are of course the big sites that have FLV format archives, but up until now WMV was the best cheapest way to stream video and its not that easy convincing those sites to turn over. It cost money and time..
Silverlight 1.0 is trying to get distribution of it’s player by hooking visitors of websites with the high definition video angle. This a small download of the player. Then when Silverlight with the .net framework comes about it will be be easier to update the install base with a more bloated player.
[…] Silverlight biting at Flash’s heals. And we know Microsoft won’t play fair. And as I recently found out, they are already pushing out FUD to people why they need to be using Silverlight. Please Adobe, […]
It makes you wonder what microsoft will do to react to ASTRO, but fundamentalism has no space in common day developing
Microsofts reps once again show they know nothing of there own technology
I’m no Microsoft zealot, but SilverLight does offer one extreme advantage over flash that I am personally excited about. And that’s the direct integration into the .net framework and WCF web services. Writing classic applications has never been flash’s thing, it’s not what Adobe are aiming for, but silverlight is hardwired to be app friendly. Database integration is a easy and extremely powerful(Using LINQ), and the object oriented setup of expression blend 2.5 and VS2008 allows for programmatic creation of anything using an inheritable system of controls. XAML is also the core component of any silverlight site, and is fully indexable by google unlike pre-compiled flash(Allthough google has worked around that, kinda).
This is mostly all new stuff in silverlight 2, so you will not see a lot of it until the final release. But my company is currently working on online presentation software in V2 that will allow anyone to create a presentation with a silverlight CMS to create presentations, slides, presenter notes, webpages, images, movies, terminal interfaces… Basically anything you could do in powerpoint, but with the looks of flash and the speed of .net. I have personally spent 2 weeks on the project and it is 99% finished, and I am a programmer with no design experience learning silverlight as I go. I could not have done this in flash.
Flash will still be king for videos and animations, it’s just to widely used to ever be knocked of the top and it works well, but silverlight will see the creation of a new set of graphical web applications that flash struggles to cope with.