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Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

bbc.co.uk

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#2
Not exactly the pinnacle of BBC reporting there. No attribution, link or otherwise for the assertion that "Developers" say they've been "betrayed". Who are they, how many of them are there, how much actual investment have they made and how do they expect to lose out? Not saying the story's necessarily wrong or untruthful, just that as presented so far it can't be considered anything more than gossip.

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#5

Not exactly the pinnacle of BBC reporting there. No attribution, link or otherwise for the assertion that "Developers" say they've been "betrayed". Who are they, how many of them are there, how much actual investment have they made and how do they expect to lose out? Not saying the story's necessarily wrong or untruthful, just that as presented so far it can't be considered anything more than gossip.

The article talks about "many of the comments on Mr Muglia's blogpost", and links to that blog post a bit further up: http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight...

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#6
I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight.

Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#7

Not exactly the pinnacle of BBC reporting there. No attribution, link or otherwise for the assertion that "Developers" say they've been "betrayed". Who are they, how many of them are there, how much actual investment have they made and how do they expect to lose out? Not saying the story's necessarily wrong or untruthful, just that as presented so far it can't be considered anything more than gossip.

I would also like their phone number, home address and working place.

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#8

Developers complaining that a company with a history of treating people poorly betrays them? Cry me a river.

I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7.

In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work on Windows and Mac, and it will be the primary way of writing apps for the Windows phone. MS has just publicly acknowledged that it's stupid to try to get the Silverlight VM to work on every stack of hardware / OS. They just did it in a very ham-fisted fashion.

That wasn't really news to anyone that's been paying attention anyway. We've been warning our developers away from writing any web apps with Flash or SL (except for video playback) for over a year now. You can write very capable, very pretty web apps using just javascript, CSS and HTML4. HTML5 just makes it that much easier.

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#9
post #6

I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight. Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).

I do wish MS would release a SL to HTML5 compiler though. That would mitigate a lot of the rancor.

Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy

#10
post #6

I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight. Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).

Actually, I think Microsoft is doing developers a lot of good by keeping Silverlight in use in other areas, for Windows Phone development, for example. The technology is still useful, and they can transfer their skills to this new area.

So, rather than just dumping Silverlight, they are still using it in other key areas, areas they are looking to help developers make money with. Don't tell me Flash developers wouldn't love to have a mobile platform where they could use their skills to develop applications on.

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