Microsoft's Silverlight for mobile to muscle iPhone

@ Doug Bostrum

If others only knew how true your words of wisdom are...

Unfortunately, they will be dismissed by the MS lovers, and probably ignored by (most of) the rest.

Tis indeed a sorry state of affairs when a global monopoly attempts to muscle in on a growing market, to attempt to lead users down the long and winding road to shit software and crashes.

"Network unavailable" has caused a General protection fault in module blah blah blah.....

Fuck off Microsoft, and stick to what you do best.

Now, what was that exactly???

Microsoft's running out of standards love?

So, there I was, taken aback with Microsoft's seemingly reformed ways promising "standards love" for all. I'm thinking to myself ... "maybe they'll even extend such love to their own mobile platforms"? After all SVG's been getting a great reception on mobile devices - an open standard for graphical applications, introducing the ability for developers to use a single markup for all devices?

Alas no, the illusions are over, Microsoft's back to it's embrace and extinguish ways. Not only they're holding back their own platforms - it seems they want to take all other platforms down with them.

It's almost reminiscent of a story I heard when:

A long time ago, in a computer land far away, a company called Microsoft was getting jittery about the competitor web browsers around them. But, rather than follow the ancient standards of the land and let the pundits have a choice of browser, they made their own additions to the ancient standards and made everyone tow the line. After many years of this harsh work for those poor developers having to work so hard making websites work with all the broken formats, Mr Microsoft has an epiphany. Seeing how actually embracing the ancient standards may not be such a bad practice and might even help out those poor developers. Maybe they could produce a product that's actually good enough to hold its own ground.

Hmm, deja vu ...

Silverlight is being built for the iPhone

Do you really think that Apple got that Exchange sync license and trademark suite for just cash? Microsoft doesn't operate like that.

You're going to see a Touch-style Windows Media device soon, but a patent battle won't happen. If the new WM hardware family is stillborn (which is unlikely), then you'll see Silverlight available for the first iPhone that has video acceleration.

WTF has Silverlight got to do with an iPhone?

Silverlight has one feature that may be similar to an iPhone feature; zooming. But it doesn't do it with multi-touch as that's an Apple patent awarded for "innovation".

Silverlight has far more in common with Flash and, IIRC, Flash did zooming 12 years ago.

Of all Flash applications, about 10% useful for visualisation and 90% are inappropriate, useless, annoying or advertising crap. FlashBlock sees to the 90%. Silverlight is 0% as it's not installed.

Why on earth would anyone want Flash or Silverlight on an iPhone? For pointless animated adverts? Or maybe for the "throw a shoe at the marketeer/journalist" game?

Went to the Microsoft Store and did a search.

It replied: 0 Search Results for "anything useful or innovative"

Telling.

@Doug Bostrom

Doug, this is a stndard part of a practice commonly known as "technological advance": one company with a lower market share invents something useful; another company with a larger market share and more money takes those ideas and makes them available to the larger market.

Think about this from a business perspective rather than the insular "Apple Good; MS Bad" approach that seems to prevail here at times... if you were losing market share to another more innovative company because they have some really neat ideas, wouldn't you try to copy them?

Admittedly it would be nice if Redmond would come up with something of their own but, in every sector of industry, big players will always get a lot of their good ideas from small innovators. If you don't agree, take a look at how many tech startups' business model consists entirely of "have good idea - prove concept - sell / license to someone who can commercialise it".

As an HTC / WM user (IMHO, still better for business users than iPhone, despite its shortcomings), I am glad MS is adding these features into Silverlight and I doubt I am alone.

Re: Chump up

The inevitable failure of yet another MS toy notwithstanding, Apple cannot even be remotely described as a nice company and anything that offers an alternative to their heavily locked down and often feature-poor platform should be welcomed.

The fact that every realistic competitor seems to have either buried their heads in the sand or are busy running around like the aforementioned appendage has been chopped off does not fill me with confidence that the smartphone market is going to rise to the new level that the iPhone has set.

Deep yawn

This is pretty unimpressive - by splitting a picture into tiles we can load only the tiles we want? Wow. I wish I'd thought of that! What's that you say? It also makes a set of thumbnails to go with it so you can have, er... thumbnails of the image? Innovation squared, man!

Now for my G1

Sweet! Now make sure it's usable on my G1. Hopefully we'll see both flash and silverlight on the mobile platforms, but I wouldn't be too heartbroken if flash went away. At least, from this developer's standpoint, silverlight is a blast to write. Flash is not. It's got too many remnants of its beginnings as a cartoon making machine.

For the record, I've never been a fan of M$'s tactics on a corporate scale, nor their OSes. That said, their development tools are terrific. They've made some strides into friendly territories nowadays as well.

I really hope their next OS isn't as bad as Vista though.

The more I read about stuff like this...

...the gladder I am that I own a plain old Samsung flip-up phone -- the "Shatner Model", I call it -- whose sole "app" is, basically, saving phone numbers, and which does _one_thing_ really well: place and receive _voice_telephone_calls_. That's it. It's supposed to do text messaging as well, and I've gotten a few, but I don't bother with it.

Silverlight and flash

If silverlight is basiccally a whizzy version of flash for your desktop then how is it compared to the iPhone, which activly doesnt support it.

Its not like multitouch interfaces are exclusivly iPhone only there have been several versions from several vendors over the past decade not least MS's own multitouch coffe table thingie.

Why do they bother?

It'll be complete and utter shit, just like everything else MicroShaft does. iPhone killer? Hahahahahaha that's a good one.

Microsoft - Another take on someone elses success.

Sorry - No Microsoft products for me. That means no Windows Mobile phone or Netbook, or laptop, etc. Microsoft - they made their bed by lying, cheating and stealing. Now they can sleep in it.

Platform != Phone

Silverlight = Development Framework / Platform

iPhone = An actual working phone

So, *maybe* someone *might* write a UI using the Silverlight platform ( which until recently lacked some basic UI components ), which is as good as the iPhone UI.

To compare the Silverlight platform to the iPhone platform would be one thing. To compare it to the iPhone as a product is utterly ridiculous.

Re: chump up

Amen. Flash has been quite adept at creating Really Bad(TM) web sites for years and years now. I don't see why we need more crap to install just to browse the fecking Internet. At least with Flash I can install the client without worrying (too much) about getting stabbed in the face a few years down the line. Also, once Flash is installed I can comfortably dismiss any pages that display "missing plugin" as the worthless crap they are.

I am getting really sick of going down this road. Again and again and again I have been dragged along with the stampede into the big, metal cage with "happy place" scrawled on the front and Josef Fritzl standing merrily by, keys in hand. After the Vista craptastoclypse I was thinking that the media, vendors and the public might wake up and start to realize that "OMG, it's a big, honking metal cage with Josef 'Run The Hell Away Right Now' Fritzl standing next to it!"

I guess not. I'd like to think that forty to fifty more trips into the cage will be enough for people to start to catch on. Yes, I can dream.

Another 'wannabe' or 'me-too' from the king of spins

They have been doing Windows Mobile for fxxx knows how long and still its shite and unusable, most companies, in fact, any decent company, after the first attempt , will look back and see what went wrong, and fix it, voilla, a working model, not Microsoft, crap after crap, yet they think by using lots and lots and lots of spins and bullshit, they can talk the customers into it. may be, but after using it, never again, no wonder why iPhone does so well, they give people what they want, NOT what Microsoft wants to give them, I can see Silverlight no different.

@Doug + @TheReg

@Dou: 'nuff said! What a great summary :)

@TheReg: When will you start being more critical (even objective) in your MS reports?

Your reporters tear apart everything non Microsoft (be it Linux, Adobe, Oracle, etc) so isn't it about time you do the same for Microsoft?

BUT... I just noticed you pick up the MSDN developer zone headlines (right hand side on this screen) so I guess you too are 'partners' of some sort. I'm starting to dislike The Reg and may switch to some more objective news reporting if this continues.

El Reg bought by the dark side?

The other day Apple got hammered by a Reg hack for improving their iPhone OS. Microdross talk about bringing to WM (a truly dreadful PoS) a couple of features that might be sort of useful and it gets billed as an iPhone beater.

Seems a bit biased to me...

Re: Chump up

And how much of your precious life did you waste posting that ?

Tick, tock.

If it is so whiz bang...

...then developers will demand a version for iPhone.

Oh, the irony.

RE: Jim in Hayward

Ouch! Wow Jim, that really told them now didn’t it... I’m sure your protest at purchasing anything Microsoft will really affect their bottom line.

/yawn