08.23.10

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Is Silverlight Unofficially Dead Now?

Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 2:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bad Silverlight

Summary: A commenter in mini-MSFT says that his/her “team got a direct message not to use the [Silverlight] technology.” Dynamic languages are also dying at Microsoft due to lack of interest from the public.

ONCE in a couple of weeks we count the occurrences of the term “Silverlight” in the news. It’s getting hard to find anything and Moonlight too is virtually gone by now. Silverlight was mentioned in just one news headline (comparison to Adobe Trash 10.1) in the past two weeks, so it slid into obscurity despite massive PR campaigns, sometimes from Novell. A few days ago someone called Alex told us in IRC: “hey, was reading minimsft’s latest blog’s comments, and stumbled onto this: ‘Anonymous said… Anyone know what the story is with silverlight? My team got a direct message not to use the technology. Received the same message in Windows Live. HTML 5 is P1.’”

For those who don’t know, mini-MSFT is where anonymous Microsoft employees typically comment. So, is Microsoft calling Silverlight off yet, maybe because of HTML5?

Last week and earlier this month we showed that Microsoft is also burying its dynamic languages [1, 2]. Here is more news coverage about it:

Microsoft’s decision to pay the salaries of several Ruby hackers was akin to a lawyer dating the bassist from a cool local band. Thus, it’s sad, but not surprising, to hear about the breakup: With the departure of Jimmy Schementi, Microsoft’s Ruby team is now down to one part-time developer.

These must be depressing times for Microsoft employees who work on projects like Silverlight and the attempts to “embrace and extend” Free/Open Source frameworks. █

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6 Comments

Danielh said,

August 23, 2010 at 2:25 am

I wonder if the Moonlight people will understand just how wasted their efforts on Mono has been? Surely you would think someone could come up with something better than .Net and Silverlight in the community?

Now its just endless hours wasted in mimicing something that never took off, never became any good and resulted in endless debates and fights.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 2:44 am
It also confirms that Mono has a lot to do with replicating Microsoft (Moonlight, .NET, etc.) and not with enabling other P/Ls in the VM.
Mikko said,

August 23, 2010 at 11:15 am

some Swedish websites use silverlight for maps and video

Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 11:17 am
I know about Ryanair and some Italian TV channel.

Mikko Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 11:37 am
Södertälje Municipality
OKQ8
Film2home

Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Thanks, Mikko. Maybe we’ll start a Wiki page soon.