The interesting thing to me in this story is that MSFT spent ten hours selling Arrington on this. They must really care what the startup community thinks of them.
If I were in his position, though, I'd be cautious about saying stuff like "Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications." If this turns out to be true, it will be the first time since the mid 1980s that Microsoft has produced a platform voluntarily adopted by good hackers (as opposed to something they had to use to make stuff work on Windows).
I'm no MSFT fanboy, but Silverlight does seem to be a real step up from Flash, which is the next closest thing out there. I agree that it's extremely premature for anyone to say something like "Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications", but it would not surprise me if Silverlight gains wide adoption (as long as it truly is as cross-platform as Microsoft claims).
Of course, it's possible that the APIs and development tools suck despite all the hoopla and good features. I haven't looked at the beta SDK.
But will they open source it, like Adobe did with Flex?
Making it cross-platform (in the short term) is a great strategy, because then, if it gains acceptance, they can force you back on Windows in the long run (assuming it stays closed during that time span).
It won't be long before they bundle it with IE and then start adding features that only work with IE. I don't think microsoft has the patience to do it any other way.
Also it's now becoming clear why microsoft was never interested in putting support for SVG in IE.
Dudes, unless the silverlight demos was pure smoke and mirrors, and all involved blatant liars, this is pretty cool stuff. Especially coming from a bunch of dead guys :).
This is something I have been hoping for from MS for a decade: website like ease of app delivery combined with a non stone age client programming model. MS is the only one with the size and reach to have any kind of shot at pulling it off. Nice to see they are finally taking their 'monopoly responsibilities' seriously. Supposed monopoly or not, size really does matter when it comes to providing us little guys with assurances that decent codecs and runtimes are present on our target market's computers ( and phones, gaming consoles etc. ). How any developers not in direct competition with MS can not like being able to do rich clients in .net + assorted tools instead of the current mix of hacked together technologies is beyond me. This doesn't mean every app has to utilize a rich client, just that for the ones that do, we can build them in a modern development environment and expect modern runtime performance.
Now..... arc.net? Orders of magnitude faster than JS...
Question: Is silverlight really part of "the web"? For that matter, is Flash? (Were applets?) It seems to me that "the web" consists of things built around W3C standards, to a first approximation.
Just because something plugs into a browser doesn't make it part of "the web"; that's just a sneaky way to put a thick client on the user's computer.
I'd argue that Silverlight _might_ be the future, but it's not the web. (Whether that would suit MSFT just fine is, of course, open to speculation.)
But even Flash for Linux seems like a low priority -- the latest version (9?) for Linux was released long after the Windows and Mac versions were done.
A lot has already been said, but I want to participate as well:
For those who think Arrington likely didnt took money from MSFT, for the past couple of months I was seeing MIX ads on the top banner, below the first post and on the sidebar. Is this not giving money albeit more subtly ?
For PG If you were in his position, having an exclusive interview with Ray Ozzie, a high profile lunch and ten hours of selling to go with months long ad campaigns on TC, I am not sure you would have done something different.
But I havent said here that you would have wanted to be in this position, that's a totally different thing.
I cant really understand this statement of Arrington "it blows away native Javascript routines - without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight"
The other reason for writing this post I guess is that the previous post from Nik didnt got enough page views "Nik wrote a very long post yesterday afternoon on Silverlight, long after the initial news broke. From a pageview standpoint, the post was a loser for us. We would have been far better off doing a one-paragraph post at 10 am announcing the news, and by the time we wrote in the late afternoon the buzz had worn off somewhat."
(1) Java is dead.
(2) MS recognizes Firefox and Safari - really good news.
(3) MS is not dead.
(4) MS should thank Anders Hejlsberg for not being dead.
(3) Adobe is f...ed.
(2) I hate numbering, it looks like a Basic program.
(1) Is Lisp on Silverlight possible?
I can't believe it - Now I need to see what all this buzz is about. Could Silverlight from none other than MS be that good? Has anyone here tried it out? Will MS now rise from the dead?
The killer features I see with Silverlight is it's ability to run javascript four orders of magnitude faster than the current average browser. Firefox 3 is apparently taking Adobe's ECMA script engine which kicks the speed up a few notches, but for browsers on the market, this is amazing.
The other one that makes me giddy is the fact that Silverlight can control the DOM outside of its shell... and I can code in Python.
I doubt that it actually runs JS four orders of magnitude faster. It may run JS 2-5 times faster, but 10,000 faster is very unlikely. I'd love to run some tests though -- is there a silverlight demo with a eval loop somewhere? (something I can type js into and see how fast it runs)
Arrington has completely lost his credibility. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I remember hearing him at Future of Web Apps saying that Adobe's Apollo is the greatest thing ever. Now this nonesense...
Is he being paid by MS to push this crap?!? Either that or he's the most gullible blogger alive.
Arrington is not technical. He's being sold on these things by slick guys in suits, with even slicker demos. He's good at evaluating new consumer products but there's no reason to assume that extends to evaluating new technologies. His lack of knowledge does make him extremely gullible.
I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd like to sell him ;).
You're absolutely right, he's just too gullible. I don't think he's taking money from these companies which products he's pushing but to someone else it might look that way.
ANY dev environment that requires you to download and install a runtime before you can run an app is bound for failure. Web apps will be impossible to beat... and they run on anything! You think you'll ever be able to run these RIA on a phone?! Not any time soon.
I'm reading promising things about Silverlight. Blowing it off because it's from Microsoft would be a mistake, though it'd be wise to be wary considering failed promises of the past.
I want to read more on hands-on SDK experiences before I think any more of it.
So I know that they're trying to say it's not just "applets 2007", but how is it all that different? There's a 4MB download, it's running a VM (a mini-CLR), and it's probably going to have security limitations.
It's only a 4mb download. Java is 100mb+ last time I checked and no one uses it much for applets.
Security limitations? I would expect them to be the same as the Java applet security limitations. Or no limitations at all since this is Microsoft we're talking about :P
100MB is probably the SDK, which you don't need for running applets.
The problem with plugins is not so much the size, though, it is the administrator rights. A lot of people surf the net from their offices in big corporations, where they might not have the rights to install anything on their computers.
I for one am very interested in this. I make games, and this would mean I could use the same code (Ruby!) on the desktop and web versions (right now it's not really an option unless I use Flash).
Ease of deployment/integration is the crucial issue, of course. The Javascript+DOM+xmlhtmlrequest model is just so horrendously, hackishly chicken-wired I'm always ashamed to even touch it...much less use it professionally. Flash and java applets from day ONE were superior in every, single way...utterly superior...except when it comes to deployment/integration. Java applets have the habit of seizing up the machine and mysteriously failing to load...flash is a bit better, but is gradually turning into this decade's popup launcher. Neither work well with webpages. Their failure to really become platforms just shows that an extra second or two of wait time can be a competitive killer.
But, if MSFT can do this right, goodbye javascript.
If I were in his position, though, I'd be cautious about saying stuff like "Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications." If this turns out to be true, it will be the first time since the mid 1980s that Microsoft has produced a platform voluntarily adopted by good hackers (as opposed to something they had to use to make stuff work on Windows).