Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted
At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week, the future of Silverlight is one topic that has gotten short shrift. There have been no sessions about Silverlight 5 and only one mention of Silverlight in the kick-off keynote.
Context & Ripple Effects
The demotion is a long time coming: Adobe argued back in February 2009 that Microsoft's Silverlight 'has really fizzled', and even Microsoft's own team had to publish a Future of Silverlight post in September 2010 to calm developers ahead of its Professional Developers Conference. What PDC 2010 delivered instead was confirmation — no Silverlight 5 sessions, one keynote mention, and an explicit statement that the strategy has shifted.
The pivot's direction is not subtle: BetaNews ran the same story under the headline 'Why is Microsoft suddenly so hot for HTML5?', tying the snub to the industry-wide turn toward open web standards. With Ballmer using the conference to push Windows Phone 7 — including free handsets for attendees and all 89,000 employees — Microsoft is repositioning Silverlight from cross-platform web runtime to one component in a device-centric stack.
First-order effects
- Silverlight developers who built skills and products around Microsoft's roadmap now face explicit uncertainty: the platform that anchored PDC sessions in prior years got zero dedicated sessions and a single keynote mention in 2010.
- Microsoft's own messaging narrows Silverlight's role — 'strategy has shifted' is a confirmed position, leaving enterprise teams that bet on Silverlight for line-of-business apps without a clear commitment statement.
Second-order effects
- Adobe's Flash platform gets competitive breathing room precisely when both rivals face the same HTML5 pressure — the two-plugin duopoly for rich internet applications weakens simultaneously rather than one vendor winning.
- Developer-tool and training vendors serving the .NET rich-client ecosystem must reprice their bets toward HTML5 and Windows Phone 7, following the audience Microsoft just redirected with free devices.
Third-order effects
- If platform vendors keep shifting investment from proprietary browser plugins to HTML5 plus native app stores, the deployment layer of the web migrates from single-company runtimes back toward standards bodies and OS-level app markets — a structural loss of control for any vendor whose leverage depended on owning the runtime.
- The episode hardens a lesson for enterprise adopters: framework choices are now hostage to a vendor's device strategy, pushing corporate buyers toward hedged architectures rather than single-runtime commitments.
The trend: Proprietary web runtimes like Silverlight and Flash are ceding to HTML5 as platform owners redirect developer ecosystems toward their own device and store stacks.