KIRUPA.CHINNATHAMBI

Whenever a new product is released to compete with an existing market leader, the x-killer scenario is quickly thrown around. The x-killer scenario occurs when a newly introduced product is paraded by 3rd parties as something created to kill an existing product. To be more specific, in this case, the new product is Microsoft’s Silverlight, and the existing product is Adobe’s Flash-based technologies.

Silverlight – the Flash Killer?
At the NAB conference a few days ago, Microsoft announced and released a pre-release version of Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/e). In its current state, Silverlight is a Windows/Mac browser plug-in that allows developers to write interactive applications such as media players, games, etc. using JavaScript and a subset of the functionality found in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

All in all, it seems like a great new technology, has a cool logo, and it features a catchy name (from MS nonetheless!) Underneath this though, it is supposedly dangerous. If you do a quick news search using the keywords”silverlight flash killer“, you are going to see a long list of articles from various publications that attribute Silverlight as a “flash killer” in the title or in the body of the text:

This notion isn’t just secluded to news publications. A quick search on blog search engine Technorati turns up similar results (search filter set to high-authority to remove noise). Last, but not least, even a kForum thread concerning Silverlight’s threat to Flash didn’t escape the clutches of the x-killer people.

One + One != Zero
When you have invested a lot of resources towards using a particular technology, any perceived threat to it can put you on the defensive. Such a threat can make an x-killer case sound appealing, but one thing to keep in mind, though, is that a new product being introduced does not signal the end of all products that compete or coexist with it. The world of developer languages is not a zero-sum game where x-killers end up being proven true all the time. Silverlight is as much of a Flash-killer as Flash was in killing off animated GIFs, JavaScript, and HTML. The Flash Player has had a good ten years of air-time to do so also! Instead, all of these technologies coexist even though a lot of the functionality seems to overlap. That is because no one technology is right for all tasks. The introduction of a new product should be seen as a good thing because somebody out there values your preferred playground (the web, the desktop, etc.) as something worth investing in.

If anything, the introduction of Silverlight makes the world of internet applications more accessible to a larger group of developers. At its core, Silverlight is just a natural extension of a subset of the new WPF/XAML language you might use for your desktop application. This similarity allows a lot of Windows developers, who are familiar (or will be soon!) with WPF and the development tools for using them such as Visual Studio or Expression Blend, to try their hand at creating applications that run in the browser.

Any successful technology such as Flash that has been around for a while has a whole ecosystem around it where the environment sustains the product just as much as the product itself. Almost all developer technologies fit this category. You probably don’t see C++, C, etc. getting front page coverage on websites and publications, but they are still as relevant today as they were decades earlier even if newer technologies and platforms seem to be getting more attention.

Current developers are not suddenly going to switch sides to either Adobe or MS because of Silverlight, WPF, Flex, Apollo, Flash CS3, etc. If anything, you’ll get some cross-pollination where developers are familiar enough with both companies’ offerings to use the right tool for the right job. Beyond cross-pollination, what excites me most about these technologies is that you now open the playing field to many more developers who now feel more comfortable porting their existing knowledge developing client-side applications towards the browser.

In the end, the key is to look beyond your own preferences and look at the broader picture as a whole. As a designer/developer, your primary goal should be to create the best software for your users, and the new wave of products from both Adobe and Microsoft make that job a lot easier.

External Links
The following are a list of links that I found useful when wanting to learn more about these new technologies and how they all fit together, and they are guaranteed x-killer and FUD free:

• On10: Quick Silverlight Overview
  A quick video showcasing what Silverlight is currently.
   
• Channel9: Creating Silverlight Media using Expression Media Encoder
  A 40 minute video showcasing how to take media content and convert it using the Expression Media Encoder to publish to Silverlight.
   
• Mike Chambers: Do Apollo and WPF Compete Against Each Other?
  Mike’s analysis on the current state of where Adobe and Microsoft’s products stand when pitted against “Webiness, Desktopiness, and Cross Platforminess.”
   
• Robert Scoble: Microsoft WPF vs. Adobe Apollo, part 329
  Scoble asks whether you are a developer who has switched sides either to or from WPF and Apollo. The Electric Rain video Scoble made is really cool, and they are one of those companies that provide tools for both SWF/Flash as well as XAML/WPF.
   
• Ryan Stweart: The Universal Desktop
  A great blog that focuses entirely on the emerging web/designer/developer technologies such as all of the various products and acronyms discussed in this post.
   
• Scott Barnes: Silverlight or Flash, Pick Now or Else!
  A nice, concise post explaining why choice is a good thing. If you frequent the popular Adobe or MS (or others!) blogs, you’ve probably ran across his insightful comments also.

Cheers!
Kirupa