Mark Pilgrim reboots the discussion on Silverlight | Hacker News Reader

Mark Pilgrim reboots the discussion on Silverlight

diveintomark.org

14 pointsjohnmartin784 comments

An excellent put-down of vendor lock-in. For the good of the industry, I hope he's right, and the standards-based web continues (for the most part, i.e. overlooking multimedia) to thump vendor-specific solutions.

However, MSFT has a much greater ability than either Adobe or Sun to cram things down the user's throat. They have their 'update' services, their ability to bundle, and their presence on the desktop with which to nag. This could help them w/ Silverlight market penetration, a prerequisite for making that platform a competitor to the standards-based web .

....And for the good of the poor schlubs who ask for nothing more than decent quality video and well performing, featurefull apps delivered to their computer or phone, I for one hope whoever can deliver an infrastructure capable of doing that thumps whoever can't. Standards are a nice way of encoding minimal required commonalities for a class of something, but should never be used to prevent anyone from going above and beyond.

I also suspect MSFT's ability to cram anything down the throat of subjects opposed is highly overrated. I personally bought my first windows machine a few months ago, having been (still am) a mac, sometime linux, user for years. If Silverlight (or flex/flash) gains huge penetration, it is likely because people prefer having it to not, not because of any 'cramming' by MS/Adobe.

Just to clarify: The whole point of a healthy industry (i.e. a vibrant, competitive one) is to provide low-cost, high-quality products to the consumer. Standards are a means to that end. Vendor lock-in, on the other hand, stifles competition, and produces lower quality at a higher price.

Consider how unfortunate it would be if, for instance, the WWW were built not on W3C standards, but on proprietary technology; say IIS, IE, and an undocumented network protocol. In that case, innovation would slow remarkably. Competitive browers (Firefox, Safari) could not be developed because they couldn't talk to the IIS servers (the protocol is secret, remember) and competitive servers (Apache) could not be developed for the same reason. The only way competitive products could emerge would be for some firm to develop a client/server/protocol stack, and market the hell out of it until it achieved sufficient penetration to be successful.

It's a lot cheaper to compete when the protocol is open, competition is what produces great product, and that's why I think it best that solutions built around open standards not just thump, but crush any proprietary alternatives. Multimedia is a bit of a disaster in this regard, but I see no reason RIA need go the same way.

I can't get on board with the notion that standards are only good for lowest-common-denominator sorts of things. The internet seems to work ok, for instance. As for people going 'above and beyond', to the degree that such activity represents the 'extend' part of E/E/E, standards can't prevent it, but responsible people ought to shun it.

As for MSFT's ability to cram product: they can bundle with an OS that has 90%+ of the market. I don't think their ability to guarantee their products penetration (not necessarily use, not necessarily sales, but availability) is a matter for serious dispute. If they want Silverlight to be a viable platform, they just have to roll it into IE 7.X or IE 8.0.

Bravo Mark for saying what a lot of us were thinking!

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