Talking Points: Apollo v. Silverlight
TIM FAULKNER — Just confess already. You don't have a clue about Adobe's new Apollo platform, nor about Silverlight, Microsoft's equivalent. You've read, in a crescendo of excitement, Michael Arrington (Here Comes Adobe Apollo), Robert Scoble …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Apollo-versus-Silverlight story has been building since March, when The Universal Desktop framed it as Microsoft, Adobe, and rich versus reach and GigaOM previewed the coming Apollo vs. Firefox battle. By early May the field had widened — Sun publicly attacked Apollo, Ajax, and Silverlight alike (Sun goes after Adobe Apollo, Ajax, Silverlight) — while Mark Pilgrim's 'Silly season' post already signaled fatigue with the coverage itself.
First-order effects
- Tim Faulkner directly challenges Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, putting the credibility of top-tier bloggers' platform coverage on the line at exactly the moment their write-ups shape developer attention toward Adobe and Microsoft.
Second-order effects
- Adobe and Microsoft keep collecting amplified mindshare from the hype regardless of its accuracy, while Sun exploits the confusion to pitch its own competing runtime against all three.
Third-order effects
- Platform launches are increasingly contested in the blogosphere before code ships, making influential commentators an unofficial channel in vendor go-to-market strategy — and inviting backlash pieces like this one as a recurring genre.
The trend: Rich-client platform wars are being fought through blogger hype cycles ahead of shipping software, with criticism of that coverage becoming part of the cycle itself.