For a change, let’s not kill a technology.
There seems to be quite a debate Mary Jo started with her post on Microsoft’s Silverlight strategy. While the strategy has shifted, the blogosphere at large has inferred it wrongly.
There are two versions of this post, a long one and a concise one at the end. Silverlight started as an alternative to Flash which can now run web apps out of the browser (like Adobe AIR) and is Microsoft’s proprietary platform for Windows Phone 7 application development.
Some people (who love to write eulogies for technologies) believe that Silverlight for the browser on the desktop did not stand a chance against Flash and has no future since HTML5 will be the cure to cancer dominant choice. During PDC10, Microsoft kept emphasizing IE9’s HTML5 compatibility and the commitment to the standard. Bob Muglia said that HTML5 is a cross platform technology, the renegade was quick to write the death note for Silverlight. HTML5 is for just about everything else.
Nonetheless I shall put forth my humble opinion, Silverlight and its ability to run applications out of the browser might just be what will help Windows remain relevant in a web dependent world. If HTML5 is for just about everything else Windows has a big problem. It has been quite a while since I came across a Windows desktop application that made me go “Wow!” Office suites are now web based, daily computing activity largely comprises of time spent on the Internet through a browser.
One can stream music, watch videos, check email, edit documents. Other than heavy duty traditional applications like Photoshop, CAD, Maya gaming etc. there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in Windows desktop applications. Windows in this case becomes less relevant as Chrome, Firefox are available on Linux and OSX. This is a problem for Microsoft, to be able to sustain the same developer interest in the desktop ecosystem. Ray Ozzie pointed out in his post that Microsoft should not remain dependent on its insanely large install base.
Chrome’s netbook OS is essentially web apps running on a computer with a browser. Quick, easy and underpowered. Windows applications can’t run on a tablet and be as useful, Silverlight apps developed for the phone however is a di9fferent story. If these apps run on the Windows desktop, Microsoft’s founding dream of Windows everywhere stays alive.
A proprietary development platform for mobile devices that expands to the desktop (in and out of the browser) will position Microsoft to maintain its dominance or at least be a formidable force.
The key to everything is the multitouch user interface.
It’s not the era of smartphones. It’s the era of multitouch. The smartphone existed for a decade, and was just a niche, until multitouch was added and sales exploded.
Android and iOS are taking over the mobile devices industry because their apps were designed for the multitouch interface. Now, any app that is designed to run on a Windows desktop PC (with a trackpad or mouse) is going to give a sub-optimal user experience on a multitouch device (Microsoft is mad to continue development of its slate that runs its Windows desktop OS… it will fail).
There is almost no point in trying to get an app to run on both a Windows PC and a slate, as they are such different beasts with different requirements. It’s better to have a complete rewrite for the slate, so the very essence and concept of the app is designed around multitouch.
The other problem for Microsoft is that it has a minuscule share of the mobile market. Its Windows Phone 7 platform, released to the rest of the world a couple of weeks ago, is struggling. It is not going to get enough Silverlight apps to compete with iOS and Android. That’s why Microsoft is hoping to hasten the arrival of HTML5 based web apps. It is hoping to make native mobile apps obsolete (which was kind of Google’s original plan also).
It is going to be pretty difficult to halt the slide of the Windows PC into irrelevance. The article cites the 3D app Maya as an example of why a PC is still needed. 3D animation apps need more rendering (computing) power than just about anything. But even it could be moved to a small ARM-based device. It’s mainly an issue of having enough OpenGL power, which comes from its graphic chipset. The actual rendering can be moved to the cloud, which is what Pixar is already doing.
It’s getting harder and harder to find a use for the PC. The ARM-based multitouch devices are going to take over everything.
Well that makes a lot of sense dude.
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You have forgotten there is something called as WPF for Windows.. silverlight is just a subset of It.
Thank God they discontinued silverlight , it was horrible from developers point of view , never got much adoption on web.
The drawback of silverlight is pretty apparent to me. Taking web apps out of the browser dosn’t do much in the way of reducing limitations. As IOS and Android continue to gain marketshare, HTML5 is the option to allow apps that will work everywhere, vs what will work exclusively on Microsoft products.
What held Microsoft so far ahead for so long was giving developers the choice of, Develop for 90% of the world or develop for the 10% of the world that dosn’t use our product.
Convincing the use of silver light is a bit harder. Even if Microsoft had a 70% market-share of the portable world, their options to developers, Use silverlight and target the 70% of our market, or use HTML 5 and target our market + the other 30%.