Silverlight – closing ceremonies
The olympics wrapped up today and I have a few wrap up thoughts on silverlight as I was forced to use it to get any Olympic coverage online. Again, I have nothing against Microsoft (unlike some of some septic responses I see with the younger developers), but they have such a clumsy hand when it comes to web and this required use of silverlight 2 beta was just another example in a clear pattern of behavior.
From my background in rich media advertising, I have witnessed first hand Microsoft throwing their huge cash behind trying to get their technologies implemented by a less than interested market. Because they dominate the OS market, they have such a trickle down effect on all their products. They have the big shops (schematic) and big players (nbc olympics, mlb).
With all the potential the olympics had to offer had to offer as a rich multimedia experience, this year failed to deliver. Was silverlight to blame, no, but it definitely was a major factor in a degraded experience.
I see silverlights blame taking three forms.
Staunching Creativity — what does this have to do with using silverlight – well it takes top designers. Top web designers work on macs. I know this seems like a silly point, but the design community has amazing loyalty to apple and within the last few years many of have moved back onto mac after a good 10-15 lapse. Not to mention expressions (i.e. what you need to develop silverlight applications in) is a bit of beast. Every one the designers I know that take a look at silverlight and go right back to flash.
UX – The install process for silverlight is horrible and on a mac its even worse. Plus all the UI/UX I have seen in silverlight is very basic (maybe with the exception of the MLB player). Obviously this will improve, but is not a good start.
Brand Communication – People hate Microsoft. Its visceral at this point. Whatever designers, developers and users can at this point to avoid ms products they usually take the step. Maybe having Seinfeld as their pitchman will change all that.
Sure silverlight is going to be a major player and this last little you-must-have-silverlight-to-watch-the-olympics is going to help the technology out, but I really see silverlight being a viewing technology for wmv and movenetworks player rather than a complete UX platform.
Oh – and if you are on a mac, you might need this:
rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight
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