Despite years of touting Silverlight into the leading cross-platform solution for the web and the desktop, Microsoft over the weekend mentioned that it was abandoning or at least deemphasizing the proprietary technology in favor of the truly open HTML 5 web standard. It will still continue to develop and improve Silverlight, but only in its use as the basis for Windows Phone applications. Silverlight on the web, for all intents and purposes, is dead.
The story was unfolded by ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley, who did some content analysis on the discussions reaching out of the Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and observed there was plenty of review about HTML 5 support, but nary a mention of Silverlight.
She spoke with Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools operation, about the detected shift and discovered it to be more than perception: While Silverlight will continue to be the development platform for the Windows Phone, Microsoft’s cross-platform strategy will favor HTML5:
Muglia’s response was pretty impressive. Although he reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to making Silverlight the development platform for Windows Phone, he noted that the cross-platform solution Microsoft sees going forward is HTML.
“Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward. But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”
HTML5 received a major support earlier this year from Apple, which famously designated the standard as the preferred rich client platform for the iPad and iPhone over Adobe Flash.
Nevertheless, this is a big admission from the company that has spent years trying to push Silverlight as a cross-platform technology forward. With Microsoft embracing hardware accelerated HTML 5 and related technologies in its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 web browser, however, the strategy has changed. Now, the company has a first class HTML 5 solution, one that integrates web apps with Windows.
Indeed, Microsoft is so serious about HTML 5 that it just added more developer features to the company’s recent launch of Internet Explorer 9 beta, which was furthered using a number of different HTML5-specific web pages and promotions. Silverlight may not have been mentioned much during PDC, but HTML5 certainly was.
It is evident that Microsoft — like Adobe, Apple and Google — perceives that HTML5 is the technology that will work across the broadest stretch of devices — and more importantly, will work on future devices.