Is Silverlight Unofficially Dead Now?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2010-08-23 07:03:02 UTC
Modified: 2010-08-23 07:03:02 UTC

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 Dynamic languages are dying

Microsoft Dropping Dynamic Languages

Microsoft Back-Tracks From Dynamic Languages

What's next for Microsoft's IronRuby?

Daily Dose - Save the Wave

It's not you, it's me: Microsoft kills IronRuby

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. ⬆

Comments

Danielh

2010-08-23 07:25:19

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

2010-08-23 07:44:00

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

2010-08-23 16:15:41

some Swedish websites use silverlight for maps and video

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2010-08-23 16:17:37

I know about Ryanair and some Italian TV channel.

Mikko

2010-08-23 16:37:01

Södertälje Municipality OKQ8 Film2home

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2010-08-23 20:16:37

Thanks, Mikko. Maybe we'll start a Wiki page soon.

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Is Silverlight Unofficially Dead Now?

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