

Bob Muglia's latest words on Silverlight - HardyLeung
http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/

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keithwarren
This back-story on this is going to make an interesting case study on social
trends with respect to PR management. Two factors, the absence of significant
Silverlight content at the PDC conference and a misinterpretation of one tech
reporters (@MaryJoFoley) work led to Silverlight dying at the hands of HTML5.

None of this squared with reality yet it had legs because Microsoft failed in
those first few hours (even minutes) to see the trend and make a full throated
rebuttal of what the story was becoming.

There is no brain-to-keyboard filter enforced on internet message boards,
blogs, twitter etc so the story grew to the point that Microsoft was now
ditching a multi-billion dollar developer division investment and killing a
technology it was banking heavily on in favor of HTML. Did not one stop so say
this doesn't make sense? My favorite was the chorus of people saying this
meant that Windows Phone 7 was dead too (ala kin) since Silverlight is the
core runtime for the phone. Really?

There is also a large contingent of people from the generally anti-Microsoft
who just want Microsoft to fail because it makes them feel good or something.
Posts like John Gruber stating simply "It’s over" are laughable. As if the
long technical nightmare that was Silverlight has finally faded into the night
and we can all breathe easier.

In the end this was not really a story about technology though, it was one
about public relations and how being asleep for just minutes in the internet
age can spell disaster. No amount of press releases can repair the damage that
has been done. Easily 100K influential tech personalities have read or heard
the Silverlight is dead story, they will tell countless others and for years
people will be staying away from Silverlight because Microsoft killed it.
Muglia said there are 600K Silverlight developers - I think they probably lost
150K of them over this and hundreds of thousands of others who would have
started Silverlight projects in the coming years who won’t now because
'Silverlight is dead'.

Great work Microsoft. Thanks.

------
mbailey
Microsoft Fla^W^W Silverlight.

~~~
Afton
What's your point?

