May 19, 2008 5:36 AM PDT
Flash and Flex continue to blow away Silverlight
Microsoft has been trying hard to get the world to care about Silverlight. Visit Microsoft.com and you'll be forced to install it if you want to stay on the site. Microsoft has also been out on the evangelism trail, talking up its Rich Internet Application platform alternative to Adobe.
As Tim O'Reilly writes, however, it doesn't seem to be having any effect, a fact confirmed by other data, as well. Silverlight is still a dog on the Internet.
Since Silverlight and the somewhat related Expression Web books started appearing in October, we don't see much trendworthy activity. We do see Flash selling 6-7 times the units as Expression Web, Flash experiencing a holiday bump and Flex increasing steadily.
Microsoft's response? "Just wait until Silverlight 2 hits! That's when we'll really become relevant!"
Maybe so. Microsoft always does better after a decade of trying. But for now, Adobe is trouncing it. Microsoft continues to lose on the web, in every fight it enters.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/136666.asp
- by PeteMagsig May 19, 2008 5:27 PM PDT
- I don't think a comparison between Silverlight 1.0 and Flash is relevant any longer, at least not since MIX08. I've been doing prototypes in Silverlight 2.0 for several weeks now, and the power of the platform, when coupled with WCF, is like nothing I've ever seen for the web. The ease with which I'm creating web applications that run in a browser yet truly behave like applications is, well, unparalleled. Anyone that doesn't take a serious look at Silverlight 2.0 for developing web apps is going to be cheating themselves out of some serious power tools. Check out silverlight.net for details, or the MIX08 videos if you want to see what I'm talking about.
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(8 Comments)I agree, Silverlight 1.0 was pretty weak sauce, but 2.0 is a full-on development platform. Compared with the recent experiences we've had with Flash based apps at my company, I can honestly say I doubt we'll be doing any serious Flash development any longer. Now, we develop apps, not ads - I'd still recommend Flash for making advertisements and stuff like that. I just wouldn't use it as a web app platform. You can see Flash's roots come from Director, whereas Silverlight's roots come from WPF, WCF, and .Net. Two "different trees" entirely. Beware comparing apple trees to orange trees, here.
The previous post is right, too - Silverlight is great for web *apps*, not web *sites*. I'd still stick to HTML / asp.net / rubyonrails / etc. for regular web pages. They're also right that neither Silverlight nor Flash is an open standards scenario. Both are quite proprietary.