Microsoft: No Silverlight 5 release in November
Summary: Microsoft didn't make its own deadline of releasing to the Web version 5 of Silverlight. And there's still no word as to when and if the Softies will talk about the platform's future. — Microsoft officials said earlier this fall …
Context & Ripple Effects
Silverlight has been on borrowed time since Microsoft announced in October 2010 that its strategy with the platform had shifted toward HTML5, a pivot that left the framework's future ambiguous even as the company kept shipping it. Through 2011 Microsoft worked to reassure the developer base, most visibly in April when it touted coming Silverlight 5 features and platform support — a commitment that implicitly set expectations for a fall release.
Missing its own November deadline for the Web version of Silverlight 5, while staying silent on when or whether it will discuss the platform's direction at all, revives exactly the uncertainty the spring messaging was meant to quell — against a backdrop where The Register had already framed Microsoft's HTML5 stance as commitment phobia.
First-order effects
- Silverlight developers and enterprise teams that built line-of-business apps on the framework are left unable to plan around a release date Microsoft itself had set, with no roadmap statement to fall back on.
Second-order effects
- Every week of silence pushes risk-averse corporate buyers evaluating rich-client tooling toward HTML5-based alternatives, accelerating the very migration away from plugin runtimes that Microsoft's 2010 strategy shift acknowledged.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a vendor winding down a proprietary client runtime without a stated end date — it reinforces a broader lesson for enterprises about building on single-vendor plugins whose lifecycles the vendor controls unilaterally, strengthening the case for open web standards as the default application substrate.
The trend: Browser-plugin platforms like Silverlight are being wound down in favor of HTML5, with vendors managing the retreat through silence and missed deadlines rather than explicit roadmaps.