Top 5 Reasons Why Microsoft's Silverlight has no Silver Lining

Traditional on-site software companies are doing their best to make some of their products -- or parts of their products -- on-demand. Microsoft's "software-plus-services" strategy straddles on-site and on-demand and ends up with a solution only fit for companies with deep pockets and a deep love of the Redmond-based software giant. Their latest announcements are around Silverlight, “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.”

Smaller companies have better alternatives. Why pay all that money to Microsoft and wait until they get it right? Using the combination of PHP and Ajax is a popular way to design applications that run inside a web browser. PHP/Ajax applications are much more responsive and interactive.

Here’s my Top 5 Reasons Why Small- to Medium-Sized Companies (SMBs) don’t need Silverlight.

1. Silverlight is still in beta. You can fight over who invented Ajax, but Google Maps and other AJAX-enabled sites have been in production since at least 2004. Can your business afford to wait?

2. Silverlight depnds on Javascript and supports Python and Ruby. Why leave out PHP? Evans Data estimates there are somewhere around 5 million PHP programmers in the world. Moreover, the number of PHP programmers is growing faster than .NET and Java.

3. JavaScript is inconsistent across browsers in both API's and performance. Depending on JavaScript to power Silverlight is a mistake.

4. Silverlight works in IE, Safari, Firefox. Support for Linux and Opera is missing, with little prospect of support coming from Microsoft. Zend’s co-founder Andi Gutmans sums it up nicely: "… the reason [AJAX is] popular is because it interoperates well with any browser and operating system. The market wants something that runs everywhere - the mainframe, on Linux, on Power." (Okay, full disclosure here. Our own Lumenation works in IE and Firefox only, so far. Still, it's fair to criticize a company that has the resources to cover all the various browsers but chooses not to.)

5. Microsoft has no plans to open source Silverlight.