Does Silverlight pose a serious threat to Adobe Flash?

[dhilipkumar]

Does Silverlight pose a serious threat to Adobe Flash?

Silverlight poses considerable, potential threat to Adobe's Flash business, and it's important to understand why the technology is wooing some developers. Through most of 2006 and a good part of 2007, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere was a seemingly dead end technology. Some journalists and bloggers called WPF/E a "Flash killer," but the only thing dead was developer interest in the Microsoft technology. Sure, that's an overstatement, but one meant to make a point.

WPF/E didn't have much visibility beyond loyal .NET developers or reporters and bloggers writing about the "Flash killer." Then Microsoft took surprising action—at least compared to its typical product/technology behavior. Microsoft rebranded WPF/E as Silverlight. Suddenly Silverlight was everywhere: The news, the blogs and developer hangouts. Silverlight's success so far is much more about branding and marketing than it is about technology.

Reasons why Silverlight caught on, while WPF/E didn't: Microsoft came out with a simple, clean product name and easily recognizable logo Silverlight code was immediately available for developer use Microsoft provided 4GB of storage for developers to place their Silverlight projects (this was huge) Silverlight let developers easily use existing tools and, perhaps most importantly, tap into existing Windows Media Video content Windows Presentation Foundation is about as nowhere as Silverlight before the rebranding.

Maybe it's time Microsoft consider rebranding and relaunching WPF, too. Silverlight is a good metaphor for Adobe-Microsoft competition. Maybe microcosm would be better descriptor. Adobe is perhaps the largest Windows developer other than Microsoft. But Adobe is regarded by some people at Microsoft as being disloyal.


indiatimes