Much has been written about how cool Silverlight is, but not everyone who has tried it is having a good experience. Blogger gfxcomplex writes a scathing personal review of Silverlight. After watching a Web cast from uvntv.com featuring Ice Cube (co-founder of UVNTV) claiming Sliverlight is going to be big and “Flash is outta here,” the blogger thinks to try it. But the installation of Silverlight goes bad for gfcomplex and it’s all downhill from there. (By the way, Ice Cube is being slashed pretty heavily in the blogosphere for his “Silverlight promotional” video.)
On closer inspection, even some of those enjoying Silverlight are doing so while overlooking its considerable lack of perfection. For instance, blogger Sarah In Tampa, posted a list of Silverlight widgets that she found entertaining, but click on the first one, and you’ll see a nice little warning with the instructions:
” ‘a’ or ‘<-‘ moves left‘d’ or ‘->’ moves right
You can also use the mouse to control the paddle.
Silverlight has a bug that prevents arrow keys from being recognized in all browsers.”
Buggy software and the media
Before Microsoft became all powerful, there was a time when software makers didn’t actually release new products until they knew they worked. One reason Microsoft made itself rich was that it forgave itself the need for perfection in order to come to market faster. You would think that this would backfire — that buggy software would wreck the reputation of the software maker and kill interest in a product. Not so!
From a marketing standpoint, it works. Human nature operates like this: once we know another option is going to show up, we want to wait for it. So when a large software company ships a completely buggy Alpha version, people stand by. When the beta version works better, they applaud. The media has some blame in this – journalists exert a lot of pressure on vendors to tell us something new and to name ship dates. We then wag a finger of blame at software makers if they fail to make those dates, even if they missed them because they were making sure their software worked before it shipped.
We are trained
Problem is people are now thoroughly trained into accepting substandard performance from our software, knowing that another version will be around that will probably fix the bugs (and introduce more, but those will be fixed the version after that.)
Silverlight maybe the perfect example of how trained Microsoft software users have become. Silverlight 3.0 (or really, 3.1 after the next SP) may add up to something great. By long before that we will all be using it. Microsoft will have a built in user base. It will undersell the competition to get Silverlight servers onto many Web sites (particularly those running IIS). Internet Explorer will ship with support for it (if anti-trust oversight doesn’t step in to prevent that). Marketing, not performance, will once again rule. The technology using world would certainly be better if this cycle were to change. But that’s wishful thinking.
