ovum: Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 Is Solid but No Game Changer

According to Microsoft (News - Alert) their new Silverlight 2.0 will deliver “a new generation of high-quality audio and video, engaging media experiences, and interactive applications for the Web.” They vaunt 100,000 companies and over 4 million developers worldwide have upgraded from Silverlight 1.1 to version 2.0.

 

Silverlight was used by NBC.com, competing against Adobe Flex used by China’s CCTV.com, for streaming to the US during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. According to CIO.com the project covered, “2,200 live hours, (had) interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage.” In addition the site had, “huge spikes of traffic, and (operated) under worldwide scrutiny.” The site also had 20 simultaneous live video streams at peak times with an additional 3,000 hours of on-demand video, including full event replays and highlights.

 

At the time Perkins Miller, senior vice president of digital media for NBC Sports & Olympics, said that this was "the most ambitious online project."

 

However, although praise was given for a job well done to Microsoft and their team, complaints were voiced by users throughout the Olympics.

 

Regardless, Silverlight came out strong and according to ovum’s Tony Baer, is now ready for prime time. ovum, an analytical research company who advises on the commercial impacts of technology and market changes in telecoms, software and IT services recently took a closer look at Silverlight 2.0.

 

“Silverlight 2.0 adds enough visual controls and changeable skins to make RIA developers dangerous. It adds programmatic support that enterprise developers expect, including support of a subset of the .NET (News - Alert) Framework, plus the ability to call network services, such as SOAP, REST, HTTP, and Plain Old XML (POX). It also adds productivity features, such as templating, so developers or designers do not have to manually cut and paste copies of controls if they want a consistent look and feel across different web pages or parts of a web page. And there is the high-definition video support that was battle-tested with 70 million streams during the 2008 Olympic Games,” said Baer.

 

He continues, While Silverlight is supposed to be a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), a graphical subsystem in the .NET Framework 3.0 version that is directly related to XAML, there remains some unfinished business. For instance, the rudimentary visual state control is still in need of future development within WPF.

 

“Silverlight 2.0 is not a game changer. Robust enough to keep Microsoft's .NET developer base in the fold, it still lacks the rich visuals of the Flash runtime (on which the Flex framework and AIR runtime are based). For instance, the Flash runtime has long supported vivid 3D, but Silverlight does not. Silverlight won't poach designers from Adobe's base anytime soon,” remarks Baer.

 

Microsoft claims to have Silverlight on a quarter of all consumer machines, compared to about 98% for Adobe. However, in regards to mobile Adobe, with Flash Lite, claims to be in about 10% of the smartphones on the market.

 

In Baer’s final statement he says, “Either way, Adobe and Microsoft are likely to be bit players in the mobile space during the foreseeable future. They are contending over a highly fragmented iPhone (News - Alert) aspirational market, as the iPhone itself remains out of reach.”