Re:Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps
by contentvoid on Friday October 29, 2010 @01:53PM
(#1848209)
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.
Re:Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps
by contextfree on Friday October 29, 2010 @02:09PM
(#1848284)
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.
Re:Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps
by robryan on Friday October 29, 2010 @10:06PM
(#1849850)
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.
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.