Why Silverlight Is Important

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy”…. your a complete toy.. I mean tool.. Seriously Flash powers over 75% of all video on web.

So stop taking money from M$ and report facts.. not crap propaganda.

never even heard of silverlight and to say it is better than flash!….

Clothing line

This is pretty good news for us all if this is even half as good as you post. I am looking forward to all these new sites and apps.

Rebooted the web, I like that. Hopefully we wont get a BSOD. Yeah that was stupid I know.

I was actually mad that they didn’t invite me to interview you on stage.

@chris
Despite your short-sighted comment trying to prove a point, flash is over 75% of video on the web. Oh, in case you didn’t hear, Silverlight is not out yet, tool.

I remember similar fan fair during the announcement of ASP.NET and while millions of web site use it I don’t think it reached the expectations it originally touted.

Seems like something to watch but its going to be an uphill battle for MS. Lets not forget how many Web 2.0 companies use and love PHP/MYSQL. Maybe this is the next step?

web-technologies still lack the responsiveness and performance of desktop apps. if i am understanding silverlight’s proposition, it will greatly enhance the performance and functionality of web-based apps.

it will be interesting to see if this is truely the case as it actually gives applications like google docs & spreadsheets an opportunity to better compete with excel.

we are 14 years or so into the internet revolution, and our browser still is clunky. let’s hope silverlight solves this issue.

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy”…

Mike, how can you make a claim like that and then not back it up with *why* you think that… I went and looked through the Silverlight specs, docs, and demos, and as a long time developer, I was thoroughly unimpressed… IMHO, this is yet another case of Microsoft strolling in late to the game and trying to follow in somebody else’s footsteps…

I thought it was pretty funny how they are pushing online video streamed at HD quality… sure Microsoft has deep pockets, but don’t they know how much it’s costing Youtube to stream *crappy* video?

“most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB)”

4 megs is not “small” for a browser plugin.

And it is over 10 megs on mac.

-b

I don’t know why anyone would be surprised by Microsoft’s successful execution. Microsoft’s strong point has always been developer tools and technologies. The problem is everything else. Can Microsoft truly be trusted to commit themselves to a cross-platform environment with an equally rich experience across platforms? History says no. And even it could be trusted the fact is that it’s google that is showing leadership where Microsoft should be. Its google thats taking the fight to Viacom. If any company in the tech industry is in a position to dictate to old media the terms of fair use and stand up and tell them - not ask - that the new paradigm is more sharing not less, it’s Microsoft. But it doesn’t, instead it tries to push DRM and kowtow to the media industry for some inexplicable reason. What we need from Microsoft is to stop acting like the rest of the tech industry is its enemy and assume a position of leadership. Instead, Microsoft comes out with another kickass developer suite, its been doing that since the 80’s, why you find that impressive is beyond me.

@bs, most Mac installs tend to be much bigger than their pc counterparts. I don’t know why, and I’d hesitate greatly to say it’s developer ignorance, but that’s just how it tends to be.

The demos load extremely quickly, with fantastic results. I am still wondering though: why is it that the logo looks like an open vagina ?

Man, the short-sightedness of the comments above is truly troubling. Either they don’t get it or didn’t take the time to get it.

I’m blown away at what is going to be possible with this platform. This is not “following in footsteps” or “just another development suite”. Does Adobe host your solutions for you? Do you get mobile support for free? The list goes on…

@12 it’s subliminal advertising to attract even the most hardcore MSphobe

I thought it was an invitation for Apollo.

Wow, what sort of Kool-aid were they handing out there?!

There are a great number of question marks over Silverlight that should at least have got some mention in this blinded-by-the-specs review.

While it may be cross-platform for deployment, how cross platform is it for actual development? If your graphic designers are all Mac, your web server maintainners are mostly Linux, it doesn’t help if your team’s workflow can only author Silverlight on Windows. (Of course, they could all migrate to Windows…)

Many things make, and have made Flash look like a toy. That is not the way to “kill” it. The QuickTime interaction layer existed before Flash (circa 1995-96) yet didn’t catch on because it was “too powerful” and developers found it difficult to get their head around.

Having an XML based schema for developing in Silverlight sounds like a path down that route too. By contrast, Flash’s designers have always understood the KISS principle, which helps when many of its users are more graphic artists than they are developers.

It’s only relatively recently, when the market was deemed ready, that the power of ActionScript 3.0 was unleashed. It could have been done earlier, again KiSS was applied..

The much heralded CLR is still very much a subset of the .NET architecture. That should be emphasized, as a lot of the appeal of .NET lies beyond the subsets.

Microsoft’s track record of accomplishing cross platform availability of their technologies is abysmal.

Eg, Mac Office updates are always out of date by years (except perhaps in in the one year 1998 when Steve Jobs personally made deals).

.wmv files have always played extremely badly, even when a Microsoft player/plugin (Windows Media Player for Mac) was made available, which has now been discontinued in favor of directing user seeking it to a 3rd party one, Flip4Mac.

Their track record is not good in this arena.

In this day of ubiquitous broadband, the “lightness” of a plugin download is no longer much of a selling point. It’s the fact that a download has to be done at all - raising security flags and user inconvenience - that is the actual issue.

Even on Microsoft’s own platform, programs written in .NET have suffered greatly in consumer penetration because of the difficulty of getting it installed. That solution still hasn’t been solved, except to hope everyone updates to Vista soon.

Just a few of these issues, and a large number more that I have got time to discuss, deserve treatment in these overly optimistic reviews.

-Reg

PS Don’t forget those dossiers they prepare for knowing exactly to woo journalists. Eg,
paragraph 4, subsection 2:
“Michael Arrington likes hobnobbing with the bigwigs. Please assign most senior personnel possible to event.”
paragraph 14, subsection 5:
“Michael Arrington likes lots of pie in the sky specs and cool effects, ala Riya. Please prepare 10 hours of targetted eye candy to secure good review.”

@15 then it would look more like a strap-on

Makes it easy for developers to download rich applications to the browser? Okay, but the last time Microsoft tried that we ended up with ActiveX and all sorts of security holes.

I’d like to know more about what they’re doing with security, sandboxing, and basically ensuring that Silverlight is not going to be a hacker’s wet dream.

I think it’s too soon to start praising or bashing the product. Wait until the developers get their hands dirty, the product comes out of beta, apps start rolling out and we get a clearer picture of exactly how effective it is.

The thing we’re seeing with Adobe Flex (more so 2.0) is that although Adobe tauted it as an ‘easy’ way to build RIA’s, the reality just wasn’t so. We’ve seen issues with Web developers struggling with the stricter OO approach to programming and generally the lack of training/documentation materials for expanding beyond the Flickr/YouTube mashups (the basics). Architecting and building an APP is far different to building a Web site, therefore to get Web dev’s to embrace it, it takes educating them on the ‘best practices’ of doing so first. Java developers, who are use to the environment, seem to have few problems adapting.

Microsoft definitely have the developer base to make this work. Distributing the player shouldn’t be a problem either. It’s going to be interesting how this folds out but from the initial Buzz of the product, it’s got my attention!

It does look impressive and playing with the Visual Studio tools for Silver, it is quick to assemble something - though I have not tried anything large scale.

I have tried Adobe Flex too and I think that it too is simple. So if development has become much simpler - great. If deployment is simpler - then great. Maybe they will raise the bar for other tools and technologies.

The only way I would see the web rebooting from this is if everyone switched over to Vista as their servers and all blue screened at once. While MS is claiming that they will support Ruby, Perl, and other languages - one thing they are not doing (for obvious reason) is supporting deployment of the server side on to Linux or Unix platforms. Nothing scales better for large applications on the server side then Linux and Unix.
Also there is no direct support for other database like MySQL, Postgres, etc.

Perhaps the client side layer will be truly impressive with Silver. But as they say nothing is a Silver Bullet and certainly not every cloud will have a Silver Lining (excuse the puns).

I still see PHP (esp. with smarty templates), Ruby on Rails, and Adobe Flex being more scalable on the back-end and still competitive on the front-end. While MS also says they will open source parts of Silverlight - my bet is it will be no code that allows the backend to be ported to Linux or Unix. They are trying to find ways to stay alive and make money as the desktop becomes but a faded memory and perhaps the OS will soon not matter.

I do see potential for Silverlight - for cranking out quick applications and for anyone that is a MS shop - so I don’t want to bash it as it has some great concepts and architecture in it. Some cool applications will certainly appear - which will push everyone else to do something better. MS still wants to monopolize the server market place and the back office - which is the main thing that irks me about this tool and still makes me question how well it will scale.

I see it as just another tool to solve some problems. Just my two-cents.

@18: “Hacker’s wet dream”: Tee hee !

.NET was also supposed to be revolutionary.

I love writing apps in .Net - but you can’t deploy them easily because of the huge runtime. (not many have it installed natively already)

Ditto with a brand new 4mb runtime for Silverlight.

If Silverlight is as pimp as everyone is saying it is, great. But who’s going to push it’s adoption to 80%+?

Will MSN.com require a Silverlight download to load it’s homepage? Let’s see MS put it’s money where it’s mouth is.

i am kinda pissed at microsoft for releasing this - because it looks freaking awesome and i don’t want to have to switch back to developing on an MS platform. the real question that we need to get a committed answer to is:

“Will you release a plugin for linux browsers?”

This is the simple question that will make or break this technology. how committed are they to it? msft is always doing this ridiculous tippy-toed dance where it tries to innovate then stifles itself so as not to step on the toes of other divisions of its business. if they don’t release a linux plug in because they think they can get people to switch from linux to windows, they are fools. they should embrace this stuff fully - it’d be awesome to get web-based MS Office running inside a Firefox browser on linux. somebody might even pay for that (and they wouldn’t have paid for windows)

If Silverlight is not compatible with Linux, it will die… ah flash will remain as the most used platform for videos and rich content. Very simple, the tendency is to use Linux, and get away from the closed applications of Microsoft.

I can’t believe that you wrote this ass kissing post about microsoft. Just because you were on stage interviewing them like a deer in the headlights please spare us with this glorified post…

Silverlight is a hail mary…everyone knows it…

I think there are a lot of things that Microsoft has learnt from other’s mistakes, and has applied to how they built Silverlight. The integration between the tools, as well as XAML and XPS etc are far stronger than flash, svg pdf integration. The power of synergy coming from that alone is going to help MSFT here.
The other interesting part of this is that the CLR is a very nice piece of work. Much better than most other VMs, especially with tail call optimization etc.
So my take is - Adobe will win on the designer front, MSFT on the developer front.
If I was Adobe, I would:
1. Unify SVG and Flash (allow flash to load SVG documents, for example)
2. Allow FLV’s to be easily coded to other formats (Nellymoser asao codec is such a pain).
3. Help people write tools that convert XAML to SVG and swf, and XPS to PDF.
4. Play to flash’s strengths (swf file format is still superior in low memory/embedded environments).

The whole performance thing of silverlight vs javascript is kinda silly (benchmarks, especially in a marketing context). I’d like to see actual benchmarks comparing this with Tamarin, which is slated to go into Firefox’s spidermonkey implementation as well.

Really though… I installed it, and it crashed my browser within 2 minutes on every one of their example sites..

I remember when people thought cold fusion was going to be the next big thing..

Well I did I little more reading and it looks like from this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=414

that they are planning to release CLR for multiple platforms - which I assume includes Linux.

But am I required to use MS Dev Studio to build and deploy or can I use Eclipse?

It will be interesting to watch what occurs with this, Adobe Flex, and whatever else is on the horizon.

@giltots - why MS office when there are so many other ones out there now that are web based and cross platform?

Is there a sample example comparing a flash application with an equivalent sliverlight application? I would really really like to try the web ferrari!!!

Mr. Arrington would it be possible to create a sample example for your non-developer audience(like you did in your posts on splashcast and ebay widgets)?

Thanks,

Mike.

People poopooing silverlight already have an agenda.

People praising it like a “web rebooter” has an agenda.

I think we should all wait to make a good educated and non paid for opinion.

Wow, Silverlight sounds very promising.

No free pass for Scoble? Scandalous!

Must be the stench of Redmond about it. Anything they make will sooner or later be addled with Microsoft thinking. The development team should just leave and join Adobe.

2 posts? Does this seem suspicious to anyone else? Something isn’t sitting quite right with me…

Show me an existing web app that works as well as this one developed on Silverlight:
http://download.microsoft.com/.....llCut2.wmv

I’m just glad someone gives a rat’s hind quarters about Silverlight.. because I sure don’t. Any company willing to invest so much sticking it to a community that just wants open standards is basically mocking themselves. They probably should have implemented SVG first in IE7, rather than wasting so much effort on this pile of “brilliantly engineered” rehashing of existing standards, sans the openness and standardization.

Haha, oh, okay, since Robert “Intel shill” Scoble and Steve “Why don’t I make any effin’ sense?” Gillmore think it’s important, I guess there’s no need to question it.

I don’t need Gmail to fly across the effin’ screen and beep at me, I just need it to handle my email. And it does that, without Silverlight, and always will.

I’d like to hear what Mark Anders thinks of all this….

Remember “important to anyone who is thinking about where the web will evolve”. The announcement is the validation of a third type of client software developers are going to think when building applications. We have the thick client (desktop), the thin client (browser) and now the “rich” client.

Read Steve Gillmor’s post to get the whole picture. So far when thinking about RIA applications we had OpenLaszlo (AJAX/Flash), Apollo/Flex(Flash) and Mozilla (XUL), now Silverlight joins them.

It is another late entry for Microsoft but this time not a “me too” solution. In this first release it supports Win/Mac in the client and C#, VB.NET, Ruby, Python as scripting languages so it has the legs to attract developers, who at last will be in charge of bringing the new interesting RIA applications

What unsolved problem does this new platform solve? What developers are they targeting?

Microsoft has lasted this long by being the incumbent, just barely good enough provider of the lowest-common-denominator product, and is functionally invulnerable in their marketshare and revenue stream for those products. This in spite of shinier (Mac) and cheaper (Linux) solutions waiting in the wings.

Sounds a lot like where Adobe is with Flash.

I read the system requirements. OSX, Linux or Unix weren’t mentioned. So, as a developer/company, why would I want to limit my reach when I could use flash which is well supported on most platforms? It may be the greatest stuff in the world, but given the choice of reaching more customers, I’ll choose flash.

Oh please, Mike. You’re exremely gullible and you’ve been drinking too much MS KoolAid. There’s so many other, better, RIA dev systems that this Silverlight thing will be in single digits for the next 5 years.

I’ll say it again this is pocketbook journalism at its worst.

Michael - I’d like you to post in the comments here that TechCrunch did not receive any renumeration for these posts. This is shameful- I also wouldn’t be surprised if half of the comments here are from Microsoft shills. Pathetic.

Interesting technology. Will have to be “toyed” with (pun intended) before giving an opinion (at least for those of us who are not easily swayed by demos). Will have a lot of catch up to do before overtaking Flash (if it ever does, but we know Microsoft’s philosophy: “Time is on our side”). How many machines are running Silverlight in the world right now? How many developers are willing to change a development system that currently works for them, and whose output works for the rest of the world? Anyway, good to see some welcome competition. One big concern is that Microsoft has no real incentive to make Silverlight run really well on OSes other than theirs, while Adobe is OS-agnostic. Their only incentive would be to accelerate Silverlight acceptance, but once they reach that point, how well are they going to keep supporting it on other OSes? Also, can’t wait for Ballmr (his new Web 2.0 nick) to announce the Silverlight plugin for iPhone.

Mike,

You’re quickly destroying your and the credibility of this site with posts such as these. Just 2 months ago you were touting Apollo/Adobe as the next greatest thing. You went to 2 confernces and gave talks about it. Now you’ve been influenced by the nonsense from MS. Fact is, NONE of these dev systems will matter since they all require a runtime download. Pure web apps is where the action will be. MS is just scared and they’re trying to keep their develpers locked in their APIs.

QUIT BEING A SHILL! I want to keep loving this site.

The silverlight website asked me to install it, so I kept clicking on the button and it kept showing the same page. It seemed to fail to detect, or perhaps failed to tell me, that I was on Linux and that this product couldn’t be installed. Instead, I was in a maze of twisty links and web pages, all alike.

So, does the mean Paul Graham was wrong?

Online applications and Microsoft go together like peanut butter and motor oil. Though I am assuming the latter combination will leave a better taste in your mouth than the former.

As cute as this is, I can’t imagine many companies ditching Flash for Silverlight especially if they are out of beta. Flash is time tested where as Silverlight is new. And from Microsoft.

Still, I can’t help but wonder where Microsoft’s priorities are with this one. How does this help their online strategies in regards to Google’s search and online advertising. Isn’t that where they should be focusing or are they just going to give up?

Mike, you probably wouldn’t be getting as many negative “stop being a shill” comments on this post if you hadn’t titled it “Take Time To Understand Silverlight. It’s Important”. I realize you’re a lawyer, but still, it’s so … pompous.

Smart people don’t like being talked down to. I’ll take time to understand the bajillion new “web changing” platforms that come out every week when they actually prove themselves. Like Flash finally did, 10 years later, with YouTube.

Until then, kindly frack off and tell someone else what to think.

No Linux = not cross platform

Everybody has Flash already, so what’s the point in this?

After reading the comments above, I can understand why MS would not want to develop a linux version. What a bunch of whinners.

Billy - I agree with you and I changed the post title.

Silverlight looks like great technology, but that is by no means a guarantee of success.

I don’t think it’s an either/or in regards to flash or silverlight. Each will have it’s place. Silverlight’s video may certainly overtake flash video, just like flash overtook Real and MS’s earlier streaming formats. However, there is a lot more to flash than video, and that stuff is still at least one generation ahead of what is in silverlight.

As far as the amazed, “ms just handed adobe their ass”, response? .. You were at MIX (a microsoft-run conference) for crying out loud. I’m sure the adobe fanboys will feeling the same way after the keynotes at Adobe MAX.

Considering to unsubscribe to TechCrunch. What happened to the blog posts I always looked forward to reading?

This sounds way to much as MS propaganda to me… where is the objectivity?

Also, since when is a 4MB download considered small? It might not be that much these days, but to say: “most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) “???

Am I the only one who thinks Scoble “left” Microsoft to mingle with the Web 2.0 crowd to gain their trust, and then slowly start spreading the MS propaganda? Muaaahahahahaaa

.Net is great but … Silver light …(browser started crashing)

@Scoble

oooh I didn’t get a free pass!!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Big Web Weenie Roast

“everyone” — windows (plus now macintosh!! oo boy!! we rule the world!! look at the stats!!)

“download” — download?

“community” — Default.aspx?

“rebooted the web” — was that a virus that only works on windows because nothing happened here (at least it didn’t crash my browser)

“open source” — where?

Mike, FYI, I’ve just unsubscribed to your blog. This post showed
how poorly you seem to handle things like this. A shame, really.
It makes you wonder how much reality was behind your previous
posts.

Mats

This seems advertisement

I would be a little worried because I like the open choices we have today, but I am not because — how can they make something so good to “reboot” all the web if they couldn’t even make IE7 support XHTML and CSS standards at the level mozilla supported years ago.

Another question I had watching at presentation the other day as they mentioned high definition videos all the time…. “Is not the only problem with playing those in real time streaming the bandwidth and not the ability of player to play/display them?”

Otherwise all technology improvements are good and I salute them… it will only make the competition sharper and things progress more. I am sure Flash (and Java) wont stand looking but are allready thinking what to do.

I installed it to Firefox on my Mac. I tried a Silverlight demo — it promptly crashed my Firefox. I promptly uninstalled it. I’ll wait for it to mature a bit (or die out) before trying it again, thanks.

I applaud Michael for bringing the Techcrunch audiance’s attention to Silverlight, and having the confidence to give it a thumbs up - it would never be a popular spin on the announcement. It is an exciting technology. And can happily sit alongside Flash. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into the ecosystem of development tools, technologies and community. I’m hoping that some big design agencies start using Silverlight for some campaigns, then we should see some real creativity and adoption.

Some reasons why I think this is not the Flash killer

- It’s from Microsoft and that carries a lot of baggage with it. YouTube will not support, MySpace is questionable, Apple - ha. (In retrospect, MS should have offered 2 billion for YT.)
- Developers didn’t make Flash great. Designers did. I haven’t heard any designers rave about this.
- It’s not cheap. Designers either use ripped versions of Flash or bought a $99 version. Expression is $299.
- Where’s the Open Source? If it’s not open from OS integration to file format I’m against this.
- Bad Name. Sounds like a crappy movie or an indie band

Why isn’t TechCrunch allowed to report that Microsoft have actually done something good? Why is this considered ‘advertising’ or ‘drinking the kool-aid’?

If Google or (snigger) Apple had come out with a platform like this, you’d all be creaming yourselves over it.

Jeez.

@magnus

I believe that what MS is trying to do here is bring proper, decent, ‘rich’ (hate that word) web applications to the masses. Do you see Flash being used to develop 90+% of websites? Nope. Is Flash used to develop the intranet and extranet sites that power today’s businesses, no. For whatever reason, no.

Web applications today are an abomination. The browser is constantly pushed, twisted and forced into doing things it was never designed to do in order to make half-usable applications - hence the proliferation of CSS, XHTML, AJAX, Javascript, etc etc etc. The combination of which makes web applications a developers nightmare. I develop them for a living. And every time I have write yet another javascript hack to validate a form field, or to get some value to or from a textbox on a form, a little piece of me dies inside.

Web development today is just way harder than it should be, or needs to be. Compare it to developing Windows apps. I hope to god Silverlight changes all this, and developers can get back to developing and designing, rather than spending their days hacking CSS to make that textbox move two pixels to the right.

Reading this post and the comments I am surprised that no one has mentioned Microsoft Astoria (the other big announcement) and it’s similarity to Google’s GData.

If you are interested I have written a post on this subject http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05.....gle-gdata/
and how Astoria + Silverlight might challenge Google GData and Firefox XUL.

Other than that I am sure Silverlight will be part of IE8 or part of Windows download. So we will get it one way or another!

as an independent content creator i can assure you i will not use this technology or make use of a service that solely relies on this technology - no matter how good it might be.

microsoft never had my trust and i believe many indie media distributors (=web users) think the same. i feel sorry for the developers, but maybe it just was a mistake to work with/for microsoft.

flash already is kind of compromise for me and while i think competition is needed this one is now already highlighted on my personal “to boycott” list.

Silverlight is DOA. Its an MS Centric and MS only technology.

The Web is built by hackers running Mac OS X on their MacBooks…. or at worst, Linux.

Michael Arrington is great at giving his impressions of seeing someone’s website… but he is not someone to get your news about software from, or for developers to take technology direction from. (And frankly, I’ve seen a lot of non-engineers talk about how great some engineer is who likes whatever technology they are talking up to immediately assume that the engineer they are talking about doesn’t really like it, or is a junior guy. Sorry, if you’re not an engineer, you can’t add credibility to your argument by saying “this great engineer really likes it”)

There are a lot of lost souls stuck on microsoft technology, and they do get to have solid jobs doing “enterprise software”.

But the future of the web is not coming from the enterprise–nothing creative is.

The future of the web is coming from hackers, and hackers have already rejected microsoft.

This is just another in a long string of well coordinated MS PR events signifying nothing.

haters DIE!!!! MS is taking over!!!

Microsoft Silvershite is so crap is crashes my browsers tyrying to install, why launch a buggy as hell plug in that cant even run a 340×220 video, LOL, what a joke.

I second matt on the install crash. It even crashed my IE6.

Microsoft does indeed do some important things, but internet
has always eluded them. What they are good at is
“giving presentation”. Web 2.0 started a while ago, and
they are late to the party. Some improved video codecs would
be good, but I think those will come from the open source/academic
community.

I’m still waiting for someone to show me how this isn’t just an Adobe People vs Microsoft People thing. I think Silverlight is very impressive and it does have a very small footprint…but I still haven’t seen anything that makes me say “I *have* to use silverlight for my next app”. It looks very slick and pretty and it does look interesting. But I guess the point is that if you’re an adobe guy, you aren’t going to run out and switch to using microsoft development products anymore than Apollo is going to make a company switch from being to microsoft shop to being adobe oriented.

IE vs Firefox, Visual Studio vs Eclipse, Emacs vs Vi…there have always been different camps who will defend their chosen product with religious fervor for all types of development apps. The fact of the matter is that anything you can do with silverlight you could theoretically do with notepad. After that it just becomes a question of which features you like and which software/company you feel more of a personal connection and loyalty to. If your first job was microsoft, you’re probably going to stick to microsoft, etc.

I think the true measure of a development app is providing something that absolutely cannot be done with hand coding (and I’m not sure that’s possible).

I’ve been using Flash for several years, and Silverlight (WPF/e) for as long as it has been around. I am amazed at how people who obviously lack experience in using these tools feel justified in commenting on how one is better than the other, including Mr Arrington.

Silverlight doesn’t even come close to where Flash and Flex is up to, and I will of course justify this. But I don’t blame it, it’s only a 1.1 product. Nor is it as easy or rapid to develop in, and yes realistically you do need to use Visual Studio/Expression and of course Windows to develop in it. I tried using my existing Eclipse + ANT + Subversion workflow, it quite simply doesn’t play fair.

This next comment is not subjective… At present there is nothing offered by Silverlight that Flash doesn’t do equal or better (you can’t exactly count WMV because that’s just the sole supported video format, as is FLV for Flash). This includes alpha video, HD video, data loading, skinning or object oriented programming. Not to mention the install process has crashed most peoples computers that have tried so far, and 1.1 is not even backwards compatible with 1.0 content.

Unlike Flash/Flex it doesn’t do: sound processing, binary data exchange, sockets, per pixel bitmap editing, bitmap filters (convolution, color matrix etc), bitmap effects (drop shadow, blur, glow), frame based animation (i.e. hand made), webcam, microphone, text input, e4x, built in file upload/download, user controls, layout engine, local data storage, linux player, express install (through player), BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY for 10 years so far! finally 1.1meg footprint… these are just a few features.

So far it’s a valiant effort, but let’s not kid ourselves here. Sometimes the level of not-knowing-anything-outside-the-MSFT-world is jaw-dropping. The video posted in these comments is great, Metaliq are obscenely good at Silverlight/WPF and Flash/Flex, but you can gaurentee they have done much better work using the latter, have a look at their website if you don’t want to wander too far or prefer to be drip-fed.

First there was java on the web, and it failed…

Then came .net to the web, and it failed too…

Move along, next!

Once again missing the point about shunning linux and this time by the site’s owner.

I have doubts about TC’s objectivity

Time to delete this link.

Silverlight looks interesting, but I just can’t risk adopting a product from a company that has a rather bad track record when it comes to the web, as well as providing cross-platform products. Im pretty sure Im not the only one with that attitude and that’s really worries me about Silverlight’s future.

I expect Silverlight to become a great tool for people already locked into the Microsoft eco-system. I wish them well and expect some pretty cool things, but Im not going to follow their lead anytime soon that’s for sure.

Last time we trusted the web to M$ we had to wait 10 years to untangle the mess those SOBs did.

This time we say

FUCK YOU M$!!!

LEAVE THE WEB ALONE!!!

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy.” Man, you must be living out of reality or somewhere in the future to predict such things. We are talking about ubiquity of 98% computers running flash plugin with rocket science internal structure and very successful marketing strategy…
Hopefully Silverlight will help to make web better and competition is always good, but still I suggest not to make such a big deal about something completely new.
BR Milan

i just got this trying to install into ie 7

Error 3010

Installation has completed successfully. However, a restart is required to complete the install. Please save your work and restart your computer to finish installation.

Stick your toy where the sun dont shine asswipe

I wish i could post a screen shot

You people realize that flash has only recently released a version for Linux? Why does everyone bash MS for a BETA product that doesn’t support Linux while at the same time supporting Adobe and Flash which “was not cross platform” for the majority of its existence?

You also have to ask yourself, what is flash used for? Games and video mostly. Silverlight will be great for both - especially video (high definition, full screen viewing). Is it a flash killer? Probably not, but it will be a great alternative for many developers. Competition isn’t a bad thing. If you don’t trust MS, don’t use the product (as a user or as a developer) but as far as I’m concerned, I can’t wait for high def streaming video in the browser (Div-X has a plug in to do this as well- no one has mentioned that)

Competition is good, but MSFT has their work cut out for them—no Mac/Linux developer tools? WTF? Who the hell wants to run Parallels to run Expression? Not me. I’d much rather run Eclipse or Flash natively thank you. Maybe next time you ride the MSFT pony, you can ask them to respond to Paul Graham’s quote, “Microsoft’s biggest weakness is that they still don’t realize how much they suck.”

Scott, you’re wish is already out there Here is HD streaming, full-screen, in the browser (using Flash):

http://www.flashvideofactory.c.....en123.html

(you right click to go fullscreen in this one)

@scott: I agree with you, mostly. But I can’t get rid of feeling that MS was somehow forced into RIA story and that Silverlight was produced too quickly. Maybe I’m wrong about this…
After all, Flex is added to platform with 10 years of backward compatibility of Flash player and that’s for taking hat off (I’m taking hat off also to many MS products…)
My suggestion is to make products more compatible, which is much better :), especially if it is true that those products will compete on the OSS market.
BR, Milan

Cross-browser, eh? Easy install?

Then why does the Whitepaper, “Getting Started with Silverlight”, show the install BREAKING in Mozilla Firefox?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-.....-e_topic14

Admire, in all its glory, the XAML as rendered within Mozilla Firefox, as shown in Figure 20. “No suitable plugins were found.”, it seems.

Remember when ActiveX was launched as a cross platform alternative to Java? Remember how much faster it was? How slick the demos were?

Remember when Microsoft killed ActiveX on the Mac and told everyone to switch to Windows?

Somehow I don’t see too many people choosing to drink from Microsoft’s poison chalice this time.

It’s interesting to see the Silverlight size of @ 4MB being touted so much. According to the link below, the download size of Flash 9 is 1.1MB.

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave.....omoid=BIOW

Did the pro Silverlight camp not realize what the competition had?

dont things take 5 years to be adopted by the general public? - so shouldn’t I wait until it comes out

Guess TechCrunch is now completely in Microsoft’s pocket - good job. From now on I’ll get my tech news from less biased sources.

yeah, Michael your lame you sell out and Microsoft sucks. I’m out.

I’m late to this discussion.

- Silverlight and PHP/RoR/etc

Silverlight doesn’t need MSFT stuff running on the server (it’s a client side technology). You can happily embed it in your PHP page running on Apache in a BSD box and all of Silverlight will work just the same.

- Silverlight on Linux

I strongly recommend that folks watch the Scott Guthrie video on Channel 9. Like a few of the commenters pointed out, this is a beta of a v1 release. Personally, I’m amazed that for a v1 product, it supports Safari, Firefox on Mac (both PPC and Intel) and Windows. In my book (and this isn’t me being a shill), that’s some darn good work from the Silverlight team

I seriously doubt the current generation of leading webdevelopers an designers are going to embrace a Windows-only closed development platform, given the fact that especially the innovative non-corporate part of this industry is dominated by open source enthousiast an Apple lovers.

Especially given the way these two groups have embraced each other in the past 5 years, the best webshops these days are a no-Microsoft zone.

What you are very likely to see is sites using Silverlight for videoplayers (unless Adobe strikes back) where they would previously prefer Flash over embedded Windows Media.

But maybe this is just wishful thinking. As much as I dislike Flash for not being part of the “open” web, if Silverlight wins the Web is dead, and we are back to Bill Gates original ‘95 wet dream of the Microsoft Network.

Silverlight is “important” in the way that it gives of one clear signal from Redmond: despite all the sweettalk, this company hasn’t changed since the days before the anti-trust cases. The people that build Silverlight must really dislike the internet.

I think you drank to much MS KoolAid when you had that big long sit down with them.

* Does Silverlight get my app in front of more users (more reach)?
Nope - writing to the Flash run time runs on more computers than Silverlight, which only runs on new versions of Windows and Macs.
* Does Silverlight allow my app to do more, or be smaller, or be faster (more rich)?
Again, nope, Silverlight lacks many controls and other features of the more mature Flex. The download is bigger, and unlikely to be faster in execution as both run native code.
* What are the business ramifications of aligning with Microsoft’s platform?
Disaster, high cost and lock in. Hardly needs saying.
* What is the growth path for Silverlight?
I assume it’ll play catch-up to Flex/Apollo, adding more and more features in a race to catch and distract from Adobe. It’s a long time since Microsoft did anything truly insightful or inventive.

@18

“Silverlight is not going to be a hacker’s wet dream”. Speaking from the viewpoint of a professional penetration tester; I can not think of a single MS technology that hasn’t been a hacker’s wet dream. I love when I get to test a MS technology based application or web site, because I know instantly It’s going to be a quick and easy job.

Btw, I said wet dream, and penetration in the same post. That’s just great.

There are about ten thousand things that Microsoft needs to get right to make Silverlight stick. “Dazzling engineering” is just one of them.

hi,

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy” … that really makes me laugh, seriously everyone here knows that Microsoft ships ALL of its products with bugs and security issues that look already “old” when they hit the market so i doubt they ‘ll do better with this new thing. Ok, they’ve done good work here, but you can’t compare that to Adobe’s products, it’s so ridiculous

1. install Silverlight beta plug-in on OS X.
2. go to an official MS Silverlight demo site.
3. dismiss the dozen or so error messages coughed up by the plug-in.
4. remove plug-in and trash installer.
5. go on living without this trash.

yes it is beta but you would think that MS would want to make sure that their demo content actually worked.

Looks a promising technology though it has a long way to go to catch up with flash.

Looks quite exciting will be interesting to see how it is cross platform.

Sad. This really hits the low water mark on Techcrunch. Mike, could you please explain how on earth you figure that SilverLight makes Flash/Flex look like a toy?

This post was a joke right? i hope it is otherwise it truley speaks volumes of the depth of knowledge and involvement you have in the community.

I think the most basic rudimentary way to answer this, is simply put, does the thing even work. Ive tried countless times on numerous computers to run the demos for silverlight but on firefox i don’t even get prompted for a download, and on IE the plugin fails everytime.
The installer says “Microsoft Silverlight could not be installed on your computer” with this “more information” message.

So to use this “Browser” Plugin i have to stop whatever im doing, shut down and restart and then use it… not very discrete and effectively for content on demand, this fails miserably.

Error 3010

Installation has completed successfully. However, a restart is required to complete the install. Please save your work and restart your computer to finish installation.

as a user, in the middle of my day, working… no i wont restart, not for a simple plugin, and the fact that i cant even use it on my default browser of choice is even more pathetic then the errored, error message.

You cant compare a product that doesnt work to a product that does work and even worse you cant say the product that doesnt work is better or going to ever compete with the working product. IMHO

Microsoft PR : Hey Mike, can you get some buzz on a new marketing effort on WPF/E.
Mike A. : Sure, what’s the story
Microsoft PR : We’re renaming WPF/E to “Silverlight”.
Mike A. : That’s it?
Microsoft PR: Yup, isn’t going to be cool — Hanselman is going to go nuts!
Mike A. : Err…
Mike A. : Okay, can I have my check now?