Thoughts from Grant Skinner and Robert Scoble

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A couple of things for your pre-weekend reading. One is a post by Grant Skinner about Silverlight. Grant is one of the top Flash guys, he’s been around a long time, and he knows his stuff. So his take on Silverlight is a must-read. He’s pretty honest, but you do have to remember he comes from the Flash world.

I don’t think Microsoft is going to get Flash developers to switch over to Silverlight. I’m not even sure they WANT that. They want the design talent, no doubt about it, but Silverlight just isn’t quite at the point yet where it can compete with Flash for it’s developer base. Silverlight is awesome because it’s going to legitimize the space and bring a big influx of developers in. Some of those developers are going to be interested in design work. THOSE are the people we need way more of, and which the whole space will be better off for. In the short term, Microsoft does well if Flashers learn Blend and Silverlight. In the long term, if some creative.NET people learn Blend, Silverlight will do just fine and keep pushing Adobe to improve – all good things.

Finally, Scoble had a really interesting post today about a chance meeting in the airport. He met an interactive architect building things in Flex for Scion. He got some thoughts from the guy about Flash and Flex:

3) Said my video did more for his understanding of the architecture of Flex/Flash than anything else on the Internet.
4) He’s looking into Silverlight but thinks he’ll stick with Flex for now because of the ubiquity and because it’s something he and his team knows and understands.
5) Is excited that Adobe open sourced Flex.

I always like hearing feedback from outside the bubble. And this guy didn’t know Scoble until watching the videos, so he seems untouched by the buzzing of the blogosphere – just a guy who wants to use a good technology to build good experiences.

[tags]Silverlight, Flash, Grant Skinner, Robert Scoble, Adobe, Microsoft[/tags]

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  2. Other Thoughts on WPF/E
  3. Some Good Thoughts on the Future of RIAs
  4. Valleywag – A Non Story about Scoble and Adobe
  5. Scoble, it’s because the “A-list” doesn’t care about Adobe.
  • Marlon Smith

    A repost from Grants blog:

    Great post,

    I agree with most of your points but the intent one, I understand your and many others distrust that MS has earned. When I step back and look at the MS platform and where MS has gotten some design religion with Office 2007 and Vista, in addition to talking with some highly respected designers and influential MS employees, it get the feeling that something bigger than MS is afoot.

    I personally see a software design resurgence coming, mostly influenced in my opinion by Apple. If Apple had the platform and tools, I may even switch, but I make my living on Windows and .Net. But at this time, to me, MS to has the best chance of changing the face of software development and engineering, by this I mean it’s large developer base, developer/designer tools (if they keep innovating), marketing and it’s desktop OS market share.

    Now this will become a feature race, but I think it’s much broader than just one-upping each other. MS is working hard to bring all it’s assets to bear on the design space (IA/VD/UX/ID). Just like they are addressing SDLC issues with Visual Studio Team System, I expect they will begin to address design in the same way along with Office/Visio and Expression Studio and on the .Net platform to bring designers and design process completely into the fold of SDLC.

    Now for them abandoning Mac support, if they get major adoption and contracts from large media and content firms, it would be risky for them to just drop Mac support, so that depends.

    As far as Silverlight killing Flash, I doubt it!

    Posted by: Marlon Smith at May 4, 2007 09:55 PM

  • http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog Scott Barnes

    Great work Ryan :)

    My comments are simple. If mainstream .NET developer base continue to embrace Silverlight’s potential and offerings, then overall designers from all walks of life including Flash are likely to add Silverlight to their skillset – simply because it provides an additional market source in which they can turn a buck or two.

    More to the point, the early adopters are likely to increase their chances of having a point of difference amongst their peers in the RIA space (eg: Cynergy, Metalliq etc).

    No killing, No limbs being chopped off but additional limbs are likely to occur (I’ll leave you to your imagination on where hehe).

    -
    Scott Barnes
    Developers Evangelist
    Microsoft.

  • Joe

    I don’t understand the defensive attitude by a few flash bloggers about Silverlight. I don’t think they should see it as a threat – it’s more of an opportunity.

    To address some of Grant’s points.

    Will MS drop Mac support? Remember MS is a content company as well as a platform company. Silverlight is not their ‘reach’ platform. You should expect live.com and msn.com properties to now start to target this platform. In fact, it’s cheaper for MS to do this as this technology is already established for other tiers of the platform. Removing Mac support is as likely as them blocking them from these website properties.

    What will the adoption rate be? Remember that MS own a fair chunk of the server side already. Because the way that ASP.NET is designed it would be very easy to upgrade the existing ASP controls to support Siliverlight as well as basic HTML. For some firms they don’t even need to make the decision to adopt.