The Silverlight Challenge

I spent some time a few months back building an application that converts PowerPoint slide shows into Silverlight applications. I was very excited about it at the time and I think it has great future potential.

Working with Silverlight 2.0 I could see how far it had come since 1.0. The difference between the two was night and day. Silverlight 1.0 was really focused on animation and a pretty GUI versus real applications. Silverlight 2.0 is much more robust and provides a substantial subset of the .Net CLR functionality. It enables real business applications.

With Mix09 coming up, I am also seeing a lot of new stuff about Silverlight 3.0 already. There are a couple of great videos that demonstrate Microsoft’s intent to make this a real player in the business application space. Check outhttp://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/03/10/silverlight-line-of-business-made-easier-with-ideablade.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/09/the-knowledge-chamber-silverlight-3-0-for-great-business-apps.aspx .

So when I needed to take a piece of business logic that I had written in C# and move it to a Rich Internet Application, my first thought was to drop it into a Silverlight 2.0 app. I created the app and it was pretty straight forward adding the video portion, the branching and the business logic. It worked great.

Then I dropped it into the web page where I intended to run it. It looked great. Next I went to a business associate to show it to them. And of course what I saw was the beautiful Install Silverlight button. And when I went to install it, it wouldn’t install. Eventually I got the player to install on their system, but it took some time and a little bit of frustration.

I wanted this piece to also drop into a highly polished marketing piece to really draw potential customers into the experience. As I began to formulate a design for that and research ways to build it, I came across a great many Flash components but few Silverlight components that compared. As I would explain to people what I was trying to do, few knew about Silverlight, so I would tell them “It’s the Microsoft answer to Flash”. Everyone knew what Flash was.

This specific application is run by clients that likely have never come to the marketing site before. Flash is installed in 97% of those systems. A much smaller percentage have Silverlight. Not only that, but the install experience with Flash 10 is much more elegant than the Silverlight experience.

Eventually I decided that it wasn’t the right time to move forward with Silverlight. So instead I moved the application to Flash. This was a difficult decision especially since all of the middle tier, back end and other web components are built on top of .Net.

In moving to Flash, it is apparent that Action Script 3.0 is moving in the direction of a more object orient development language targeting the business application space.

The challenge that Microsoft has in this space counter intuitive. They may own the desktop and the browser. But Adobe owns the RIA framework space. The Silverlight challenge is to see how quickly they can come close to the Flash installed base before Flash becomes a real player in the business application space. It may seem trivial, but particularly in the marketing space, the Silverlight install is a real barrier to a seamless user experience that customers demand.