Microsoft Has Seen The Light. & It’s Not Silverlight. http://tinyurl.com/32jyufv
My primary reasons for disliking Flash were that it was proprietary (only one vendor/source) and that it has horrendous performance on OS X (definitely improving but still bad). I disliked Silverlight for the first of those reasons: any development only comes from Microsoft.
Well, it seems that Microsoft have had a “shift of strategy” :
During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC),ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,†he said. And while he said that the technology has some “sweet spots†for media applications (presumably like Netflix, which uses Silverlight on the web), its role as a vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime appears to be over. “Our strategy has shifted,†is how Muglia put it.
Instead, as they made clear during PDC, Microsoft is putting their weight behind HTML5 going forward. Hallelujah.
Further convergence on a single standard. Now if we can get everyone on the same page for HTML5 audio and video, it would be a big step forward. (I’m looking at you Mozilla!)
One reply on “Microsoft Has Seen The Light!”
As usual the Media has taken this out of context.
Yes Microsoft sees HTML5 and the huge uninformed backing of it as platform no one can ignore.
But as usual, Silverlight and Flash will be used for stuff HTML5 simply cannot do (Which is a lot) or is just to difficult to use.
I consider HTML5 like Linux.
Linux on the desktop will be as sucessful in the wider sense as Linux compares to OSX. There is a reason we choose to use a one-vision platform like OSX over Linux.
For the same reason there are good reasons to use a one vision platform of a bastard child HTML5 is.
Flash and Silverlight are not dead. They will grow as they can do many things HTML5 cannot or does badly. (Such as speed of development, cost of development)
But yes, HTML5, the STATIC web will be the foreseeable future on the low powered static pan around the screen web we seem to accept on the iPad type experience.
James