Do You Still Believe In Silverlight?

Unless you're not really paying attention to what's going on in the Silverlight world, you probably already heard that Microsoft has confirmed a shift in strategy for Silverlight:

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy. “Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

It's the development platform for Windows Phone (more on that in a minute). It has some sweet spots in media and business apps. Things sure can change a lot in a short time. Silverlight was at first positioned as an ideal technology for media. After that, it was increasingly being marketed as a great platform to develop business applications, cross-platform ones even. Now, despite the fact that nothing has been taken away from the platform's capabilities, it has some "sweet spots" in both areas where it was supposed to be a great technological choice. Every single feature or capability that once formed Microsoft's message that it was great for business applications is still there. And they won't take that away either. The mere fact that their message about Silverlight has transformed so much now, is incredibly telling. If you're a Microsoft customer who's invested a lot in Silverlight for business applications, you have some pretty good reasons to be upset about this.

After all, given how the stated goals of Silverlight have evolved in the past 3 years, who's to say those "sweet spots" will remain interesting enough for Microsoft? I have no doubt that they're going to heavily invest in making Silverlight a great development platform for Windows Phone (whether they will succeed at it is an entirely different matter though), but what you need to develop great mobile applications differs a lot from the needs you have when building great business applications. Will the needs of developers using Silverlight to create business applications be met by Microsoft? Let me rephrase that: keeping the manner in which they're now promoting HTML5 in mind, will they also keep putting additional resources into improving some niche areas of a technology who's primary purpose is to facilitate mobile development? Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. I sure as hell wouldn't bet on it.

Now, unlike a lot of people, i don't think that Silverlight is dead. Far from it even. Silverlight has a future as long as Windows Phone has one. Its real future lies in the mobile world now, and no longer in the browser or on the desktop. It's going to keep working in your browsers, and its going to keep working on your desktops. But you really need to wonder how many of the needed improvements for those 2 environments you'll see being introduced to Silverlight, and how long it'll take. It's quite reasonable to assume that improvements in Silverlight which target the mobile development story will be receiving higher priorities than those which target the browser or desktop development model. After all, that is what the new Silverlight strategy implies. And given Microsoft's need to conquer a respectable position in the mobile world, and their ever increasing support of HTML5, it only makes sense for them to do so.

As for Silverlight being a suitable platform for mobile development, i can't help but wonder whether it really can live up to the high expectations that people will set on it. Anyone who's done any serious Silverlight development knows that it is a technology which suffers from a lot of memory usage problems. Partly because there are quite a few memory leaks in Silverlight's own controls, but also because the Silverlight programming model easily leads to a lot of dangling references which will lead to serious memory problems in a memory constrained device such as a mobile phone. Unless they get rid of the memory problems very quickly, i can easily see Windows Phones suffering from a lot of problems as people start using more and more 3rd party applications on their phones simultaneously. Well, it would have to support running multiple applications simultaneously before it'll be a real problem, but you know that's only a matter of time.

So, as for me personally, i don't really have a lot of belief left in Silverlight as a technology. I don't see it advancing much more in the browser or on the desktop, and i think it's got some real, difficult challenges ahead in the mobile world. What do you think?