RSSAdobe: Microsoft's Silverlight 'has really fizzled'
By Angela Gunn | Published February 10, 2009, 6:55 PM
Addressing attendees at a tech-and-telecom conference on Tuesday, Adobe EVP and CFO Mark Garrett spoke of the challenges ahead. Microsoft's software doesn't appear to be one of them.
Speaking at a fireside-chat style event at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009, Garrett noted that "if you set the economy aside, there are a lot of tailwinds" acting to boost Adobe's reach online. Those tailwinds are coming from many sources, including the warm front centered around the fever for online video (the company estimates that four-fifths of all video online plays through its software) and the hard, cold drive to digitize information stored in printed media.
There's plenty to do, and Adobe says it's the company doing it.
What about Microsoft, asked an audience member, which launched Silverlight two years ago in April? Silverlight launched strong, said Garrett, but the push to adoption "has really fizzled out in the last 6-9 months, I'd say...We're innovating ahead of them, and they have not been able to catch up." Garrett suggested that Microsoft simply didn't have the mindset required to put forth Silverlight aggressively.
Adobe's own AIR platform, on the other hand, does not suffer from lack of corporate effort, which has passed the 100-million-downloads milestone. "We're starting to get that ubiquity" for the cross-platform software, Garrett said, chuckling when an audience member asked at what download milestone things "start to get interesting."
We have all, of course, had a surfeit of "interesting" for the past few months. Though he declined to provide an earnings call-type breakdown of current numbers, Garrett acknowledged that the economy's wearing on everyone's nerves. For instance, "the timing was tough" on the launch of the company's latest version of Creative Suite, which launched in the second half of September just as the economy tipped over.
The company's making adjustments, and Garrett touched on a few options that Adobe could pursue "if things got worse" or the expected turnaround is slow to arrive. One of the least appealing, he said, would be a corporate restructuring of the sort so firms have pursued; companies can go to that well too often.
"I don't want to get into a mode of restructuring every six months," Garrett said, adding that such shakeups demoralize staffs and distract from longer-term goals.
adobe better not relax thinking the war is won. If vista 7, I mean windows 7 can break the XP log jam then I expect SL to be included with the 7OS plus... remember the good old slogan "Word isn't done till Word Perfect won't run." Expect all kinds of performance and stability problems for adobe on the new 7OS platform.
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|"Silverlight launched strong, said Garrett, but the push to adoption "has really fizzled out in the last 6-9 months, I'd say...We're innovating ahead of them, and they have not been able to catch up."
Yeah, right. The problem here is that SL 2.0 has been shipped 4 (four) months ago. The guy is either clueless or idiot :)
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|@cerveza: I've never experienced any issues with Silverlight runtime.
So having any crashes in it means that your computer is not setup properly. Maybe you have a virus or just registry corrupted or maybe your hardware is faulty (like RAM).
I think you should call your IT department and complain.
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|Adobe should focus on providing metrics that matter, not just spin that sounds good in the echo chamber...
http://blog.davidyack.co...etrics-that-matter.html
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|MS pushed and pushed this program every time I went to their site for updates, etc. I gave in one day and was sorry I did.
Too many crashing issues. What a waste of my time.
I will Never install Silverlight again.
And I will make sure it is not installed in our IT images!
I'll stick with Adobe.
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|Silverlight is an excellent technology, and we have been using it quite successfully. There's no fizzle, except in Angela notion of reality, honesty, and ethics.
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|Does the 100 million milestone mark count when it is bundled with Adobe Reader? Your required to download it whether you want to or not. How many people have downloaded Reader to just remove Air?
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|why would you remove air? if you're an it admin, i can see doing that with security concerns over new apps being installed without proper checks and balances but as an end user air shouldnt impact you in any way at all... it's just a framework for apps to live on and a pretty good one from what i've seen
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|Great flamebaiting in pulling that quote out of context to get an explosive headline and people who want to comment without even reading the article. It seems it's working.
This website is becoming more and more like theregister.
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|Adobe: We won!! We are the best!! WHAT??
The word arrogant come to mind.
So does Adobe REALLY think that this claim will stop people from using or developing for Silverlight?? M$ Silverlight will soon if not already come pre-installed on ALL Windows machines and to get windows updates..
I still do not beleive that the internet will be the future desktop..
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|Silverlight 'has really fizzled'
Well, coming from Adobe, I guess those are definitely 'fightin' words'. ;-)
Now we can watch the usual fanboy retorts offered by authorities in the playing of WOW and P2P filesharing - not to forget the authorities on the really serious issue of our day: Which game platform currently being trounced by Wii: the PS3 or XBox360 - will ultimately dominate their mother's den.
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|I think there are lots of people devloping web-apps on Silverlight or JavaFX. But most of those apps are not finished yet. And many developers would not even consider AIR, because Adobe was never a platform for developers - it is a platform for designers...
I will be releasing major Silverlight application in 3 months or so...
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|ditto. Flash is great if you need to get dancing monkeys on the screen. SL is a real RIA platform.
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|what make it's better? I've developed on both but prefer air so i'm curious if you actually have a valid opinion or if it's just hot air
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|Silverlight works great for me. I use it on Netflix without any issues.
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|I find no compelling reason to download AIR or Silverlight.
My computer came with the Flash codec preinstalled, that's all I care about.
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|i hope you've updated flash since then...
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|Congrats on being happy in your little bubble.
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|Silverturd will be everywhere due to Microsofts monopoly on the OS. Microsoft failed to subvert the web with IE and its non-standard rendering, now it is trying to rewrite the web in its proprietary, patent encumbered, Silverturd format.
What is really sad is i bet Microsoft will bribe Silverturd through ISO just like they did with the horrid MSOOXML format.
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|"What is really sad is i bet Microsoft will bribe Silverturd through ISO just like they did with the horrid MSOOXML format."
Which, as you've clearly had your head under a rock, has been abandoned as the default document type for the next versions of Office.
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|after legal actions resulted in their forced support of the real open standard
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|hah AIR, buggy and software built on it really needs to be worked on, very resource intensitve at times. Flash however, well its been around awhile, how could it not be the lead and its good? Silverlight, is actually far more feature rich than Adobes alternative, i just think MS has suffered here because of the old 'its MS, its going to be bad mindset, which is bulls***.
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|I think it will suffer from 'its MS, its going to be badly supported on every platform not microsoft and on every windows version not longer sold by microsoft. So I don't trust them enough to use there software on my website. Not all my customers are on microsoft latest.
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|agreed.
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