Serious business behind Microsoft's Silverlight-3 tease Microsoft's been playing the tease on Silverlight 3. The company's been slowly upping the ante on expectations, promising "major enhancements", while outsiders who traveled to Redmond and have met the Silverlight team have returned with tales of wonders but few details, citing pain of confidentiality agreements. This month, …
"Another thing to look out for in Silverlight 3 will be deep linking - the ability to put hyperlinks in Silvelright-3 applications. ...and of embedding your video in another person's site enabling video to propagate virally. "
I suspect it's not just viral video that will enjoy this distribution method.
to Microshaft products.
Yeah I know about moonlight but they haven't even got V2 Silverlight functionality out yet. As soon as V3 is out the guys from Redmond will be all over people who use it for their sites to upgrade to V3 thus denying anyone who uses anything but a Microsoft O/S access to their sites.
The longer they can keep other O/S's out and the more sites they can get to run V3 the more locking they will have and eventually people will give up with these 'toy alternative Operating Systems' and return to the Microsoft fold.
Then the killer will be that full V3 support will be on Windows 7 ONLY. That is the way to get the masses off of XP & Vista in short order.
The result?
PROFIT
PROFIT
and more PROFIT
for the monopoly.
".......bug-free product will follow."
From MS? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
For the record there's no such thing as "bug free" in anything much more complex than yer average "hello world" program. There are two categories, versions with known bugs and versions with undetected bugs. That's all. Anyone who says otherwise is in management, has got there via a non-IT discipline and is talking out of their bottom.
As an addendum to my previous comment
If Silverlight 3 is a success (in terms of adoption) and they make it difficult for other OS's to run it then it is going to piss off Google big time especially if they succeed with the subsidized netbooks(tm) as in http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/04/schmidt_on_netbooks/
"From what we heard at last week's VSLive, you can expect a Silverlight 3 code dump"
Oops, I misread that as a Silverlight core dump - I expect one of those every time I go to a page with Silverlight content. Let's hope they've taken five minutes out from adding all these nice new features to make the whole thing a little more stable.
the problem as Microsoft evolves Silverlight more and more is that it will probably become much harder to keep multiplatform compatibility, especially on "non personal computer" devices.
Moonlight is still limited to version 1 compatibility and they are already talking of the version 3 of Silverlight and adding new features. They should first get Silverlight 2 working on more platforms before pushing with 3. What about Linux, the iPhone, the Wii etc... Currently it looks like Silverlight 2 is only working well on windows and intel mac, which is very different from flash which works on many more platforms.
I don't think that the future of web based apps is on the traditional PC, but rather on netbooks and smaller mobile devices. Pushing a PC/Mac only solution doesn't seems productive to me. If you look at the netapplications stats, in Feb 2008 the Windows+mac market share was 99%, in feb 2009 it is only 98%, which means that non traditional platforms such as Linux, the iPhone and the consoles doubled their market share in 1 year. Clearly this is where the growth is.
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