Silverlight Redux: Listening to Feedback...

  • Article

Although it was great to see that my post on Silverlight got picked up in a few places (in particular, Digg and TechMeme), it certainly generated a lot of feedback in the comments section! I hope that after reading the comments, you'll at least give us a tiny amount of credit for being open and transparent - I haven't censored the posts that I didn't like the look of :)

It's interesting to read all your feedback, and I can promise you that it is taken seriously. At our next leadership team meeting, I'm sure we'll be poring over all the commentary and trying to incorporate a good deal of it. To address a few points:

  • We built Silverlight to be a cross-platform solution: after all, we have WPF already for the richest Windows platform experience, so it wouldn't make sense for us to build an inferior Macintosh experience. From the very first release in December of a CTP of this technology, we sim-shipped a Mac version, and both releases have had complete feature parity. Any difference between the two is a bug, not a devious attempt to lock out potential customers!
  • To suggest (as one commenter did) that unless we release Silverlight as open source, we can't claim that it's cross-platform is hard to take seriously. I guess Oracle, Acrobat Reader and Flash aren't cross-platform either. I was hoping we might get at least some recognition for the fact that we shipped a solution that works just as well with Firefox and Safari and Mac OS X as with IE and Windows.
  • Just because we haven't announced something now doesn't mean that we're ideologically opposed to doing it. Our engineering team are working hard on building a runtime with broad platform support and a great feature set, but we can't do everything at once. Our current list of supported operating system versions and browsers is a good start, but we'll evolve it over time.

Enough said. I'm not writing this to be defensive: everyone is entitled to their opinion and I'm committed to provided an open channel for feedback, positive or negative. But I also wanted to show that I do read every comment and am interested in the discussion. Our success or failure with Silverlight is contingent on whether we satisfy developers like yourselves - time will tell how we do, but I hope that you'll at least give us a chance to earn your trust.