3 ms·

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

swatcoder 3y ago
I think Silverlight was making deep inroads in the enterprise market for rich internet apps and that this was a growing customer retention issue for Adobe with Flash. That's part of why they invested so much in Flex and AIR as a more engineering-centric alternative to the Flash app's designer-centric timeline interface. They wanted to shore up what they were losing to Microsoft. The consumer usage of Flash was most visible (games, cartoons, brochure sites, video streaming) and Apple's evisceration of that market was what ultimately killed Flash, but things were already looking grim on several fronts before that happened.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Lots of enterprise apps like ERP and that type of shit may STILL require Silverlight for older versions. It was huge in that market.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, although this still stands! I still miss macromedia Director though. I learned to program with HyperCard and then director, and I always thought it was a shame it got canned when adobe bought it.. it was much nicer in lots of ways, although the player was more heavyweight. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really found a proper replacement for HyperCard!
  - RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
    Perhaps you would enjoy Decker: http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/
detritus 3y ago
Yeah, coming from back at that time, to consider Silverlight at all is to give it too much credit. Jobs and his unwillingness to support it on iPhone killed Flash, and that's that.
- gibbitz 3y ago
  Internally Adobe hated Flash. It strode right past Live Motion which used the UI paradigm of After Effects to produce animations which didn't cater to the traditional key framing model Flash was built on. I feel pretty strongly that there were forces inside Adobe that wanted to take advantage of the merger to bury the Macromedia IPs. Adobe had a great relationship with Apple. Photoshop was finely tuned to work on Macs and the majority of the creatives using it were working on Macs. Adobe could have threatened to put Apple's computers in the ground by limiting Photoshop support for OSX in 2009 in order to gain support for Flash on iOS. They didn't. They just never thought of Flash as an Adobe product. If Apple stopped supporting Photoshop things would have gone nuclear.
  - gs17 3y ago
    That would definitely explain why they were so half-assed in their attempts to adapt to HTML5.
- johncoltrane 3y ago
  Word on the street, at the time, was that Apple and Adobe collaborated actively on making Flash work on the iPhone without straining its battery. It is the failure to achieve that goal that prompted the whole about-face.
gs17 3y ago
The only time I ever interacted with it knowingly was the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 software.
patwolf 3y ago
The original Netflix streaming site used Silverlight, I'm guessing because browser DRM wasn't up to snuff at the time. That's about the only time I willingly used it.

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

swatcoder 3y ago

I think Silverlight was making deep inroads in the enterprise market for rich internet apps and that this was a growing customer retention issue for Adobe with Flash. That's part of why they invested so much in Flex and AIR as a more engineering-centric alternative to the Flash app's designer-centric timeline interface. They wanted to shore up what they were losing to Microsoft. The consumer usage of Flash was most visible (games, cartoons, brochure sites, video streaming) and Apple's evisceration of that market was what ultimately killed Flash, but things were already looking grim on several fronts before that happened.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

Lots of enterprise apps like ERP and that type of shit may STILL require Silverlight for older versions. It was huge in that market.

bigfudge 3y ago
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, although this still stands! I still miss macromedia Director though. I learned to program with HyperCard and then director, and I always thought it was a shame it got canned when adobe bought it.. it was much nicer in lots of ways, although the player was more heavyweight. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really found a proper replacement for HyperCard!
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  Perhaps you would enjoy Decker: http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/

detritus 3y ago

Yeah, coming from back at that time, to consider Silverlight at all is to give it too much credit. Jobs and his unwillingness to support it on iPhone killed Flash, and that's that.

gibbitz 3y ago
Internally Adobe hated Flash. It strode right past Live Motion which used the UI paradigm of After Effects to produce animations which didn't cater to the traditional key framing model Flash was built on. I feel pretty strongly that there were forces inside Adobe that wanted to take advantage of the merger to bury the Macromedia IPs. Adobe had a great relationship with Apple. Photoshop was finely tuned to work on Macs and the majority of the creatives using it were working on Macs. Adobe could have threatened to put Apple's computers in the ground by limiting Photoshop support for OSX in 2009 in order to gain support for Flash on iOS. They didn't. They just never thought of Flash as an Adobe product. If Apple stopped supporting Photoshop things would have gone nuclear.
- gs17 3y ago
  That would definitely explain why they were so half-assed in their attempts to adapt to HTML5.
johncoltrane 3y ago
Word on the street, at the time, was that Apple and Adobe collaborated actively on making Flash work on the iPhone without straining its battery. It is the failure to achieve that goal that prompted the whole about-face.

gs17 3y ago

The only time I ever interacted with it knowingly was the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 software.

patwolf 3y ago

The original Netflix streaming site used Silverlight, I'm guessing because browser DRM wasn't up to snuff at the time. That's about the only time I willingly used it.