The fact that Microsoft stopped developing a technology that hardly anybody used isn't a surprise, I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed.

Silverlight is not a technology - at least not in the sense that it is a product and relies on two technologies - XAML and .NET.

As such it always amazes me to see otherwise intelligent people complain about Microsoft dumping or abandoning them and their Silverlight-based products.

The technologies in Silverlight are in most cases directly portable to WPF, Windows Phone and WinRT. Any Dev that throws out effort based on Silverlight probably deserves being abandoned.

"I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed."

Well... MS was that company, up until they weren't.

I've seen it myself, having worked for a dev shop that was deeply married to silverlight (within the past year). Glad I got out of that gig.

What if instead they picked java applets or the slowly dying flash? It isn't that Silverlight died, the entire install runtime to run app concept (short of doing video) was killed by html5.