
Mark Pilgrim reboots the discussion on Silverlight - johnmartin78
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/05/02/silly-season
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mxh
An excellent put-down of vendor lock-in. For the good of the industry, I hope
he's right, and the standards-based web continues (for the most part, i.e.
overlooking multimedia) to thump vendor-specific solutions.

However, MSFT has a much greater ability than either Adobe or Sun to cram
things down the user's throat. They have their 'update' services, their
ability to bundle, and their presence on the desktop with which to nag. This
could help them w/ Silverlight market penetration, a prerequisite for making
that platform a competitor to the standards-based web .

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stuki
....And for the good of the poor schlubs who ask for nothing more than decent
quality video and well performing, featurefull apps delivered to their
computer or phone, I for one hope whoever can deliver an infrastructure
capable of doing that thumps whoever can't. Standards are a nice way of
encoding minimal required commonalities for a class of something, but should
never be used to prevent anyone from going above and beyond.

I also suspect MSFT's ability to cram anything down the throat of subjects
opposed is highly overrated. I personally bought my first windows machine a
few months ago, having been (still am) a mac, sometime linux, user for years.
If Silverlight (or flex/flash) gains huge penetration, it is likely because
people prefer having it to not, not because of any 'cramming' by MS/Adobe.

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mxh
Just to clarify: The whole point of a healthy industry (i.e. a vibrant,
competitive one) is to provide low-cost, high-quality products to the
consumer. Standards are a means to that end. Vendor lock-in, on the other
hand, stifles competition, and produces lower quality at a higher price.

Consider how unfortunate it would be if, for instance, the WWW were built not
on W3C standards, but on proprietary technology; say IIS, IE, and an
undocumented network protocol. In that case, innovation would slow remarkably.
Competitive browers (Firefox, Safari) could not be developed because they
couldn't talk to the IIS servers (the protocol is secret, remember) and
competitive servers (Apache) could not be developed for the same reason. The
only way competitive products could emerge would be for some firm to develop a
client/server/protocol stack, and market the hell out of it until it achieved
sufficient penetration to be successful.

It's a lot cheaper to compete when the protocol is open, competition is what
produces great product, and that's why I think it best that solutions built
around open standards not just thump, but crush any proprietary alternatives.
Multimedia is a bit of a disaster in this regard, but I see no reason RIA need
go the same way.

I can't get on board with the notion that standards are only good for lowest-
common-denominator sorts of things. The internet seems to work ok, for
instance. As for people going 'above and beyond', to the degree that such
activity represents the 'extend' part of E/E/E, standards can't prevent it,
but responsible people ought to shun it.

As for MSFT's ability to cram product: they can bundle with an OS that has
90%+ of the market. I don't think their ability to guarantee their products
penetration (not necessarily use, not necessarily sales, but availability) is
a matter for serious dispute. If they want Silverlight to be a viable
platform, they just have to roll it into IE 7.X or IE 8.0.

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nickb
Bravo Mark for saying what a lot of us were thinking!

