Friday, January 23, 2009

Silverlight vs Flash: Did someone get paid off?

Working for Adobe, I have heard a few rumors that Microsoft has been willing to pay people to use Silverlight (R). This webpage evens quotes a former analyst with Directions on Microsoft:

"...if Microsoft is willing to pay, computer makers will be willing to include Silverlight."

Others have written articles exposing that Microsoft is willing to woo developers to Silverlight. I guess if I ran the program, I would jump start it the same way if I had a big blank check and a brand new un-proven technology.

Today a colleague at Adobe sent me a funny email. Apparently Flash gurus XPLANE (http://www.xplane.com/) built a brilliant Silverlight application which slightly echoed the Adobe MAX developer theme posters. I installed Silverlight 2.0 to view this one - great work!!

When you zoom in on the poster however, there is what appears to be a payoff going on. One character identified in the keys as the "Client Business Owner" (see below)....


appears in the picture to be handing a large bag of cash to the Account Manager (identified in key) as shown below:

Could it be a clandestine clue of a secret payoff? What do you think? Or maybe the development shop is paying Microsoft to use Silverlight?

Disclosure: I do work for Adobe and yes - we have paid people to do Flash projects for various reasons.

1 comment:

  1. I am working on a high-profile internet application and we had Microsoft woo us to use Sliverlight over Flash. They were really nice guys and willing to bend over backwards for us, but at the end of the day 95%+ of the machines out there have the Flash runtime installed vs. 25% for Silverlight (by Microsoft's estimates -- in reality it is much lower).

    IMO, it's another iPod vs Zune / David and Goliath situation that Microsoft cannot win. My biggest concern was Microsoft realizing that they can't win this battle a year from now and dropping Silverlight altogther, sticking us with an obsolete codebase.

    ReplyDelete

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