Comment by Someone1234
11 years ago
I'm playing devil's advocate: But Silverlight was too little too late. It arrived right as Flash was effectively dying. I don't blame them for killing it, it was dead on arrival.
I can explain the entire problem with Silverlight using two dates:
- iPhone initial release: 29th of June 2007
- Silverlight initial release: 5th of September 2007
Now, we can argue if iOS killed Flash, but I think between iOS's lack of support and all of the security issues associated with Flash, it was set up to lose popular support (and then HTML5/HTML5 DRM filled in the gap, even if it took years ultimately).
Silverlight was a Flash competitor in a world that decided it didn't need Flash.
Silverlight was a half-assed, brain-dead attempt at trying to compete with Flash. It started out as a cool demo and then blew up into a role that didn't fit it well with insufficient support on the dev side. What it should have been was a competitor for AJAX/jQuery. What it turned into was just another video player browser plug-in.
Indeed, and yet we somehow ended up with a whole bunch of Line-of-Business desktop apps written in Silverlight. I did a brief stint at a windows-shop that made and maintained a variety of such apps.