Silverlight is dead. Long live Silverlight!

Well PDC10 is over (note: head on over to the PDC site to view all the sessions).  There was a lot of talk about Internet Explorer 9 (and another preview update) as well as general web development.  There had been some reports on the 2nd day of PDC commenting about the shift in strategy about Silverlight.

You may have read the initial story from Mary Jo Foley which led to the tsunami of information about Silverlight being done, over and killed except for the Windows Phone 7 platform.  Other popular news outlets picked up on the story, reporting on it and adding their own, yet unconfirmed, statements to the situation. 

Please take a moment and click here to read the update from Bob Muglia about Silverlight.

Many of you have emailed me personally asking for information.  I sincerely appreciate your candor and contact in reaching out.  I’ve strived to be a transparent individual and an approachable one as well within the beast that is Microsoft.  I’ve never hid my contact information and do my best (not always successful) at responding to inquiries.

Please be sure to read Bob’s message above.  It re-affirms our commitment to Silverlight.  A number of us wanted to share our feelings immediately upon this news storm, but wanted to ensure that you heard it from the top.  I’ll add my own personal commentary here…

One email I got (in response to all this news hype) was from a CIO expressing concern about his decision to use Silverlight in a multi-million dollar application investment he was making.  He wanted to know if his bet would be a good one.  My response had nothing to do about which technologies are better than the other.  Here is basically what I shared:

This past year I decided to take a deeper role in the engineering side of Silverlight.  In making this decision I had to relocate to Redmond.  This involved me relocating my family away from our comfort zone and having to start completely new.  It was perhaps the biggest personal change in my life I’ve made yet.  My kids left their friends, as did we.  My wife left her close knit family in AZ.  My wife stopped a business she was just getting great momentum on before this decision.  We sold our house at a significant personal financial loss.  We moved to an area where home prices didn’t fall like we were used to and thus aren’t in a position of buying power.  You’ll forgive me if I say that no software project has made more of a bet on Silverlight than I have personally this year.

I don’t write this to ask anyone to have pity on me that I lost money on my house…I’m a big boy and understand what consequences mean.  I write this to hit more at the heart that I’m personally invested in the success of Silverlight.  I uprooted my family and a comfortable lifestyle to work closer with it.  I’ve made a big bet on Silverlight.  I hope to see it continue to grow.  I don’t have a crystal ball and nobody can tell the future in 5-10 years, but in the near term that I can tell you we’re invested in Silverlight.

Here’s some good reading:

• PDC10 and Silverlight (Bob Muglia)
• PDC Thoughts from Steve Ballmer
• Scott Guthrie on the state of Silverlight
• So what’s the fuss about Silverlight?
• Silverlight and HTML5 and Your Future 
• Laurent Bugnion commentary (Silverlight MVP)

Now, we’ve got a team busy working on the next version of Silverlight so we better get back to work and away from this distraction.