Not impressed. That’s how I’ll summarize Adobe’s response to Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 release today.
“We’ve been watching the announcements made from the MIX 09 conference and thus far we haven’t seen any real surprises. There doesn’t seem to be advancements on the capabilities that Adobe already provides Web developers,” confided to me an Adobe spokesperson.
With Silverlight, Microsoft duplicates Adobe (sounds familiar? Apple?)
“In fact, a large number of these product capabilities are duplicates, or near duplicates of features that we’ve already got in the market – in shipping software, while Microsoft is simply demoing these capabilities for upcoming releases.
Silverlight 3 “outside the browser” offline support is old news
“Given the success we’ve seen with AIR as well as how Adobe innovation appears to work its way into Microsoft products, it makes sense that Microsoft is also talking about offline support in Silverlight 3.
Originally, at MIX 2007 the focus for Silverlight offline support was on fully functional apps that were built using WPF – but those applications were Windows only.
At MIX 2009, they announced that in the future Silverlight applications can work offline, and the functionality seems to be that developers will be able to allow users to put a “bookmark” of an application on the desktop.”
Offline Silverlight is no match to Adobe AIR
“It appears Microsoft is attempting to claim the benefits of AIR without actually providing them, since AIR allows Web developers to build applications that are cross‐platform and have access to functionality that is available only outside of the browser, for example access to client‐side files or background processing of notifications.”
