Microsoft Silverlight Strategy “Has Shifted”

As reported on this ZDNet blog post by professional Microsoft watcher, Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft have been somewhat less enthusiastic about Silverlight than HTML5 over the last few months and this has been the source of some irritation for those developers who invested time and effort into learning the technology:

“When Microsoft first showed off Internet Explorer 9, its most HTML 5 compliant version of IE to date, in March of this year, questions began to arise about the company’s commitment to Silverlight. Officials insisted that the two would coexist and that Silverlight would be Microsoft’s cross-platform development platform for mobile, Web and PC platforms for a number of years to come, as HTML 5 was far from becoming an accepted standard.  But in the past few months, Microsoft’s backing of HTML 5 has gotten more aggressive. Microsoft is pushing HTML 5 as the way developers can make their Web sites look more like apps.” [Read More]

Microsoft appear to want to re-position Silverlight for use with mobile devices and reduce its role within the browser.  For those DAM vendors (and their customers) who have pinned their colours to the Silverlight mast, this is not welcome news. As a video delivery technology Silverlight does look to be heading the way of RealPlayer and a range of other legacy formats.

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