Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers

ericatcw writes "At its Mix08 Web development conference, Microsoft said that its Silverlight rich Internet application platform is downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times every day; Microsoft has a goal of 200 million installs by midyear. But Silverlight is at the beginning of a long slog towards gaining traction. Computerworld did a quick analysis of job listings at nine popular career sites and found that an average of 41 times more ads mentioned Adobe's Flash than mentioned Silverlight. As expected only 6 months after Silverlight's introduction, the number of programming books carried on Amazon.com was also heavily skewed in favor of Flash."

if these downloaders are anything like me

[rucs_hack]

Like me, many of these 1.5 million are people who where breifly confused into thinking they needed silverlight in order to access the microsoft site. I took advantage of their dreamspark initiative, and encountered a 'you need to install silverlight' message. Turns out this was for a small silverlight animation, nothing to do with the main content.

Since then I've not been back. Nor would I intentionally seek to develop for that platform. Why bother? There's javascript and flash already.

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[BasharTeg]

How many hundreds of millions of sites do the same thing with Flash? Install Flash to power this ugly animated page header! Neat.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[Westley]

Um, in what way is *this* post pro-Microsoft? You can't very well argue that "Microsoft technology hasn't yet taken off" and "Non-Microsoft technology hasn't yet taken off" are *both* anti-MS subject-matters.

Cross-platform, or not?

[dalleboy]

I'm still a bit concerned about the supposed cross-platform-ness. Is the Javascript file Silverlight.js still used to initialize the Silverlight object in Silverlight 2? If that is the case it will never be truly cross-platform.

If you aren't running one of the platforms supported by Microsoft (Windows (IE, Firefox) and Mac OS X (Firefox, Safari)) you will get redirected to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92800 [microsoft.com] (or similar), regardless if you have a Silverlight compatible plugin installed. Using the Silverlight.js file is the defacto standard way of initializing Silverlight, at least in previous releases.

It will be the responsibility to each web-developer to update their copy of Silverlight.js in order to get Silverlight to run on other platforms than the ones directly supported by Microsoft. This will never happen, except perhaps for a small portion that are Moonlight enthusiasts.

Millions?

[The Aethereal]

Of those millions, how many are like me and have downloaded and installed Silverlight, but can not make it work? When I browse to a Silverlight page, it just says that I need to install Silverlight. So I uninstall it, redownload, and reinstall. Nothing changed. I believe this is in IE and Firefox.

Re:1.5 million times every day ?

[apdyck]

The answer to this question is simple. I did a fresh install of Windows XP last night (for a client), and my third round of Windows Updates (after the Windows Installer and the bulk of the updates, including IE7), one of the updates was for Silverlight. To be fair, it was considered an optional update, but the average computer user sees update and thinks "I need that for increased security" or some such. Long and short, it's on Windows Update, and that's why they're getting so many downloads.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

Well, AMD isn't stiving to make the CPU world a better place, they are trying to beat Intel. AMD would love to get all of Intel's marketshare, I'm sure, and Intel feels the same way. What exactly is wrong with that?

Nothing. But because Microsoft is a monopolist that has in the past abused their monopoly power, I would be wary of new technologies the produce. What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE? Remember, embrace, extent, extinguish.

Re:Why switch?

[hummassa]

I will agree as soon as someone finds a way to build both a Flash and Silverlight application from the same source code, makes almost all websites provide both and the users can choose with a browser setting which one to use. Then the issue is at least close to comparable to Linux distros...

Plug OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.org]...

Re:MS moving too quickly

[Dragonshed]

Alot of people have been waiting to see what 2.0 looks like before jumping on board. 1.0 had many limitations and deficiencies that most didn't want to deal with. The entire programming model has changed from Javascript in v1.0 to C# (or any .NET language, with assemblies, debugger support, etc) in 2.0. It is also possible to use IronPython, IronRuby, and VB, but I haven't yet experimented with any of those.

Silverlight 2.0 draws many parallels to .NET as it contains a fully fledged .NET CLR while running on both Windows and MacOS X, sporting an API similar to WPF (Xaml visuals, Storyboards and Animations, Templated and Styled Controls, databinding, etc) and yet is still a nimble 4.3 meg download to end users.

Based on the demand for MIX tickets and Sessions, and on conversations I've had with various people, I think there will be a substantial increase of interest in the 2.0 beta compared to 1.0. Anyone that has produced a site in SL1 knew 2.0 was coming, it was just a matter of the form and function details.

Lastly, Miguel de Icaza was at MIX showing Moonlight on linux running a few SL1.0 samples. Just as with any major Mono project, expect a lag time of up to a full product cycle behind MS's releases.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Actually, I said "pretty much compatible" where I could have said "compatible". Personally, I NEVER had a program compile and run under one distribution and not compile and run under another. Give me a few prominent examples, and I'll give you half a point, if you wish. :-) And Gnome vs. KDE ist actually just bells & wistles. Nothing really important. I have UBUNTU here, which is actually GNOME only. Nevertheless, there are KDE packages for that as well, which were a snap to install. Way easier than to port .NET to java - even if you actually had the source.

Regarding AMD vs. INTEL, you seem to be forgetting that those are instruction set compatible. When I buy the one or the other, I guide my decision based solely on the current capabilities and price of the two, nothing else. Pretty compatible, if you ask me, and still a competition.

I'm all for competition, as long as it's carried out at least in a half-way fair way and if it can actually bring the benefit to MYSELF, the CUSTOMER. So far, I have experienced ZERO benefit from MS penetrating any place. Actually, during the browser wars, I experienced a real set-back, as the lemmings among web designers (and their bosses, to be fair) decided IE is the only browser worth supporting. I don't want to see that happen again.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

No, I'm not presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. I'm conjecturing that if Microsoft wants to abuse their monopoly, they might make SL work in Windows only, and then people would buy Windows specifically to view some SL only sites.

I agree that switching a site from IE-only to working in other browsers is expensive. Any time you need to switch from one technology to another, it's very expensive and risky. That's why businesses continue buying Windows machines instead of switching to Linux. Switching to Linux would mean having to run a browser other than IE, an office suite other than Office, an email client other than Outlook, etc. Making each of these switches has interoperability problems, because of the proprietary extensions in IE, and the proprietary nature of Office and the Outlook/Exchange protocol. It's called vendor lock-in, and it makes MS tons of bucks. If MS products used and adhered closely to standards, they wouldn't have the lock-in that they do now. Silverlight is yet another proprietary technology that can be used to induce yet more lock-in.