Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834

by moxiemk1 • 16 years ago

179 142 16 years ago

contextfree12• 16 years ago

this has been clear for a while. Ballmer said as much at a recent financial analysts' meeting: http://decav.com/blogs/andre/archive/2010/10/27/ballmer-micr...

"Interviewer: "HTML or Silverlight, what is Microsoft's lead strategy for developing rich internet applications? Silverlight, HTML5, or acquiring Adobe?"

Ballmer: "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question, the world is going HTML5... The world is just pushing down that HTML5 path, and so are we... What we've really done [with Silverlight] in very good ways is to repurpose it as an important part of the client platform, so yes, you will embrace HTML5, but it's also clear people want client apps... So we're dedicated to Silverlight, but with a little different concept, and we're embracing HTML5."

rbanffy14• 16 years ago

That's why Windows Phone 7 doesn't support HTML5?

Seriously, Ballmer is never clear in interviews.

windsurfer• 16 years ago

HTML5 support on the windows phone would mean Windows phone devs could support other phones, and would unify the market. Fracturing it helps increase the value of niche apps, while unification would only level the playing field and leave the windows phone at a disadvantage.

confuzatron5• 16 years ago

Windows Phone 7 doesnt yet support copy and paste. I would not look at a lack of 'HTML5 support' as strategic.

Someone2• 16 years ago

I cannot see them giving up client-Side Silverlight that easily; controlling the whole stack is an advantage for them just as it is for Adobe (if Flash is king, Adobe sells tons of developer tools, and possibly licenses on mobile devices) or Oracle (with java).

So, I expect their strategy is to have a full Silverlight path where supported, with a fallback to HTML/SVG/Canvas when needed. If so, Windows 7 Phone phones would currently have more need for a good Silverlight implementation than for good/full HTML5 support.

If Windows 7 Phone phones manage to gain traction, the business strategy could then well be to decrease effort on the HTML5 fallback path.

mrj• 16 years ago

I don't get it. Their brand new phone doesn't support HTML5.

cryptoz3• 16 years ago

Nor does any MS browser for Windows XP, which still has > 50% of the Windows market share. It's very doublespeak of them:

Yes we love HTML5, but we won't have any of it on our most popular OS or our new mobile phone

...wtf?

trezor• 16 years ago

Again? XP is old. Seriously. Just get over it.

contextfree12• 16 years ago

Here's what I suspect their strategic angle on this is:

I think when MSFT talks about HTML5, what they tend to mean by it is web applications with desktop-like rich UIs, fancy graphics (that, in particular, require hardware acceleration on powerful PCs to run smoothly), etc. They have decided it's in their interest to encourage the proliferation of such applications (expect to see a lot of tools to help this along - Microsoft have already released an Adobe Illustrator plug in to export to HTML <canvas> (http://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/) and Blend 5 is strongly rumored to support SVG/<canvas> as a target platform) for two reasons:

1. They think it's a chance to differentiate their web properties, especially by moving them toward a rich-client model in which they already have experience. They tried to do that with Silverlight previously but didn't get enough acceptance from various quarters. They probably think it's an opportunity for their development tools business as well (in particular, <canvas> being a low level API leaves a lot of room for new frameworks on top of it).

2. If rich-UI, CPU/GPU-hungry HTML5 sites become common, people who haven't upgraded in a while will need newer browsers and PCs to view them correctly. Of course, Microsoft is hoping to encourage them to move to IE9 and therefore to Windows 7, but even if they go to another browser instead, if they're on older computers they'll still need to upgrade their PC for the sites to run well, regardless of what browser they're using, and by default that means moving to a W7/8/ ... machine. I think this is probably the most important consideration for them.

judofyr• 16 years ago

Their brand new phone is of course using the most stable browser they have, and their brand new browser supporting HTML5 is of course not the most stable browser they have.

In a perfect world they would have shipped the phone with WebKit, but we all know that Microsoft is not going to do that (I'd love to be proven wrong).

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Pivoting the Microsoft ecosystem is like trying to shove the Indian subcontinent a foot to the left.

On the plus side, continents may not move very quickly or in the precise direction that one might desire, but they do move.

ihumanable• 16 years ago

This doesn't make much sense, it's their phone software. All they have to do is leverage their own browser tech for IE9 for their phone. It may not be easy, but if you can't get all the legs walking in the same direction in your own company, why should people have faith in your ability to deliver a good user experience.

rbanffy14• 16 years ago

> Pivoting the Microsoft ecosystem is like trying to shove the Indian subcontinent a foot to the left.

It's not like pivoting an entire ecosystem. It's about launching a mobile browser that doesn't suck.

confuzatron5• 16 years ago

But isn't HTML5 a whole bunch of not-standardised-yet technologies? If so, I am not amazed that their brand new platform doesn't support it.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

iPhone did support it more than three years ago.

contentvoid2• 16 years ago

It will, they just focused on UI and development ecosystem first and I'm sure the updated mobile IE will be a derivative of IE9 which isn't complete yet.

jister• 16 years ago

Silverlight + "Intranet" is always a good combo. I'd say a better replacement for smart-client apps.

glhaynes3• 16 years ago

As long as your users don't want to use most mobile devices. I'd much rather put out HTML5 apps where possible... intranet apps in particular seem to tend to live for longer than you ever thought possible. But, yeah, it's definitely nice for certain scenarios.

cpr3• 16 years ago

Sure, but an even better replacement would just be modern webapps.

kenjackson14• 16 years ago

Why? On the intranet you're likely dictating the browser/technology used anyways. Why not simply use what's best for the specific job. If it's Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, rich client app, virtual machine, etc...

neovive• 16 years ago

This is smart competitive positioning by Microsoft. Microsoft has been burned in the past for not embracing standards early and clearly wants to be on the right path from the outset. The difference this time around is that HTML5 also presents itself as a competitive option to the proprietary iOS and Flash platforms, to which Microsoft offers no significant or competitive alternative.

eddanger2• 16 years ago

Writing cross-browser "desktop" html/javascript is very painful right now. The mobile world is a beautiful playground because IE isn't a serious player. Now if Microsoft would adopt WebKit for its mobile browsing, then I'd eat my hat.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

It's "very painful?" I can't imagine how you'd describe cross-browser HTML/JS in 2004.

dstein2• 16 years ago

Try 1998, when DOM didn't exist. That was pain.

eddanger2• 16 years ago

What kind of html/js apps were you making in 2004!?

apl2• 16 years ago

So Microsoft is still a gargantuan hydra with different heads fighting each other?

It's fairly fascinating. On the one hand, you get this sensible, open Microsoft - the company that still delivers reasonably good Desktop products, has a great development platform, wonderful developer resources/support, now supports HTML5. On the other hand, you keep encountering its evil twin: the institution that made the Kin, that scrapped Courier, that can't decide which horse to back in the internet race, that made IE7, and so on and so forth; the company that will end up losing most of its mind and market share to the new (and old, actually) kids on the block.

Wish there was only the former.

ergo98• 16 years ago

It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?

If everyone was using Silverlight today I suspect they wouldn't be saying the same thing. Instead it has virtually no traction among devs (aside from a core group of hardcore Microsoft boosters), it has little legitimacy, and the smartphone explosion has rendered it dangerous to choose.

If Flash is a relic of the past (true), then Silverlight is a relic that didn't even have relevance in the past.

apl2• 16 years ago

  It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?

I really wish this was all there is to it, but their behavior doesn't qualify as adaptive and pragmatic as far as I'm concerned. It qualifies as aimless and schizophrenic.

It's one thing to suggest, fail and then drop technology. Google does that. Even new Apple does that from time to time. It's another thing to suggest, fail and then keep developing technology in some state of semi-cancellation while backing a completely different approach at the same time: for instance, Silverlight. Right now, it seems like a classic case of throwing stuff at walls and seeing what sticks. That's part of the reason why Microsoft is struggling in any area except for its core business.

msg• 16 years ago

Right, but you have to take another step back. As you say, it's good that Microsoft moved away from Silverlight because it didn't gain traction and was wrong for the market.

But before we laud them for moving away from yet another high-profile flop, why didn't it gain traction? Why was it wrong for the market? Because it failed to learn the lessons of the past. It is yet another not-invented-here, one-stack-to-rule-them-all product from Microsoft. It needed developer mindshare and it was going against an entrenched competitor in Flash.

Why was it even begun, amounting to a massive waste of developer time, money, and opportunity cost? That's the real problem at the core of Microsoft. Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, failed projects pad manager resumes on 1 Microsoft Way.

contextfree12• 16 years ago

I think it's really weird that people point to cancelling the Courier project as an example of a bad decision - all we ever saw from it were some leaked concept videos! Without knowing the actual state the project was in - it might've been a huge mess, as the Kin was - surely it's impossible to have any insight into the wisdom of continuing it.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

This is why I don't bother with Microsoft's development platforms. They are always moving the goalposts.

geuis• 16 years ago

Lets keep in mind exactly what Microsoft does. They throw a ton of money and developers at some product and make a lot of noise about how this is their next big thing. Then they seem to completely or mostly drop it and they're off to the next thing.

My fear and source of consternation is their sudden "love of html5". Yeah, they're currently doing good on getting IE up to spec. Even though its still not 100% there, but that's ok since its in beta. When its officially released, it will matter then. What I firmly believe is going to happen is that IE9 is going to get released and will get the occasional security patch, but they're going to stop doing major development on it and again the MS browser will stagnate for years again.

So everyone should stop getting excited when Microsoft says they're doing this one thing or another. Apple keeps its cards close to the chest and stays focused on what they're building. Microsoft is the guy at the table that always goes 'Hey guys, wow look at this King/Ace I have! Now look at my pocket Queens!'

johnzabroski• 16 years ago

You need a more complete history of Microsoft to know the full story.

Back in the early DirectX days (1996), Microsoft was working on a technology called Chrome Effects that was intended to compete with VRML as the world's ultimate "Networkable Graphics" format. This history is covered in books such as <em>Renegades of the Empire</em>. This was stuff from back when Michael Abrash worked at Microsoft!

vetinari6• 16 years ago

From cca the same time - remember Fahrenheit?

zmonkeyz• 16 years ago

I remember reading about that in Boot (lol) magazine. At the time they said it would run on a 300mhz P2 and I was floored that it would take so much processing power. :)

projectileboy3• 16 years ago

Right on. This is exactly why I started to actively avoid consulting gigs where I'd have to work with Microsoft technologies - whatever knowledge you gain has a shelf life measured in weeks, because they're constantly on to the next shiny trinket.

glhaynes3• 16 years ago

More than any other software dev I know, they seem to constantly be trumpeting that "this is a complete ground-up rewrite!" as if that were a good thing every time.

kenjackson14• 16 years ago

That's odd. It seems like most of the stuff I learned 20 years ago is still useful.

raganwald• 16 years ago

Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond?

Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

pragmatic• 16 years ago

Ironic isn't it? Most (if not all) of Joel's products are built on Microsoft technology.

bradhe• 16 years ago

There's more to this "strategy" than a browser. Don't forget they have a huge suite of tools for authoring web content, for instance.

tlianza3• 16 years ago

The company who should fear this turn is Adobe. This is the exact opposite of "market validation" for Flash.

This is a competitor signalling that they are no longer betting on a Rich (binary) environment in a browser. They see that as a dead-end, and have undoubtedly spent considerable time, money, and effort coming to that conclusion.

cryptoz3• 16 years ago

Adobe makes money with tools, not with Flash. If Adobe makes good HTML5/JavaScript tools, and keeps making Photoshop, they'll be fine.

Goosey• 16 years ago

It's still dangerous to them. They are the de-facto standard for Flash creation tools, but there is a much larger ecosystem for HTML5/Javascript tools. Even discounting existing HTML5/Javascript tool users who may or may not have a grudge against Adobe for Flash you still have to expect a significant amount of currently-Flash devs during the transition.

tlianza3• 16 years ago

Indeed, I'm referring to the Flash tool, not the Flash runtime which is obviously free. But, the investment in getting the Flash runtime everywhere is what makes the platform valuable, and therefore what makes the tool worth using.

But, I agree with you that if they pivot they should be fine. To some extent they're also (smartly) re-purposing their existing tools for native mobile development: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/packagerforiphone/

I'm skeptical that they'll be big in the "good HTML5/JavaScript tools" business based on what they have[n't] done with Dreamweaver, HomeSite, ColdFusion, etc. They just don't seem to have a lot of developer momentum there, IMHO.

mahmud5• 16 years ago

1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash.

2) Flash is ActionScript, and ActionScript is for all intents and purposes "EcmaScript-NG". JavaScript is becoming ActionScript. Adobe got all the predictions right, and EcmaScript is headed that way (I see type-annotations in your js-future :-) and because ActionScript ~= JavaScript, it would be very easy for them to convert to "HTML5", whatever that might become. This is such a trivial exercise, it's done several times a day, js ports of flax libraries.

3) We have already seen CSS3 "IDEs", and you have GWT, Aptana, etc. It's the "HTML5" scene that's going the old Flash way, by integrating development and tools, projectifying scripts, and becoming more organized.

treeface5• 16 years ago

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but how is Javascript becoming ActionScript? To name a few major differences: the OO architectures are very different and Javascript doesn't compile.

forgottenpaswrd• 16 years ago

"1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash."

Exactly, people talk about "flash being slow", but the competence is even slower when they try to make what flash does well(drawing vector shapes videos).

E.g when the OSS community tried to make animated svg or flash videos, they discovered their performance was simply awful compared to flash(the two guys that created it were not idiots after all).

MS tried with silverlight not to do difficult things with vectors like flash does, and use hardware acceleration at the maximum level so nobody notice how poor their performance is. The same strategy of metro on win7 of "not trying to do what computers are not good for(translation: our employees don't know/don't want to do the hard work it takes to compete with flash, as computers improve we try to make the minimum effort, and use marketing to compete) "

gruseom• 16 years ago

Adobe got all the predictions right

That's funny, I was arguing exactly the opposite recently:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798679

As for JS becoming Actionscript, good god I hope not. And I bet not, too: V8 is far faster than AVM2 and doesn't have any of that stuff.

exception• 16 years ago

How about if Adobe helped make the decision in the first place? Let's say, Adobe realized Flash is on its last legs, that Apple hate them and their engineering staff have much greater alignment with Microsoft than any other platform. Now let's say the call up Microsoft and say, hey, how about you buy us and put our engineers to work building kick ass H5 dev tools.

At the same time, Microsoft realized that like Flash, Silverlight will never achieve universal penetration, hence why developers are reluctant to use it on the web. Microsoft, seeing Adobe having similar issues and spats with Apple think, hey, what if we bought Adobe and put all the Flash engineers on H5.

Just a thought.

dstein2• 16 years ago

Microsoft is really the last company anybody should be looking for guidance on Internet technologies. Their strategy has historically been to make web development as difficult as possible, so as to delay the eventual replacement of the PC as a computing paradigm. Microsoft only stays in business if the PC paradigm lingers, and lingers...

ashleyreddy• 16 years ago

HTML 5 is still in a draft state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5 Looks like it will be in IE9. So whats all this about Microsoft not adopting open standards? Their kind of a big company isn't it okay for them to support both?

kenjackson14• 16 years ago

I find it ironic that just two months ago the same pundits were talking about how WPF was dead and Silverlight is taking over. Now Silverlight is dead and HTML5 is taking over. Yet in MS most high profile product, WP7, it supports Silverlight, but not HTML5.

Why do I get the feeling that most people have no clue WTF they're talking about? :-)

marcamillion• 16 years ago

This looks like a classic case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Despite how much Apple raves about HTML5, the fact remains that the bane for the App store are HTML5 apps.

Microsoft has just raised the stakes a bit...but as many commenters have pointed out, time will tell whether or not they have staying power. They have a tendency to wax and wane on their support for products.

seltzered• 16 years ago

Is it possible for developers to see this merely as microsoft positioning everything to be more like apple?

I'm seeking some validation if the following is now true:

wpf ~~ cocoa (for mac)

silverlight ~~ cocoa touch

html5 (formerly SL when used as webapps) ~~ html5.

I hope microsoft pitches the above this way, so developers like me that need to use their tech stack can sleep easy at night. It's a simpler way to think about everything. And Flash can still have it's place for RIA and grow to be a premier tools developer for html5 apps.

Remember, apple originally took an opposite direction when the iphone first came out, originally expecting developers to develop mobile html applications for the phone. That idea died quickly, and a year later Cocoa Touch and the App Store came out.

contextfree12• 16 years ago

It's not quite that simple, because Silverlight is for desktop apps as well, and there are also the Windows native APIs (which are strongly rumored to be getting an overhaul in 8).

Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps

Related Stories