Microsoft Changes Silverlight Strategy, Focuses on HTML5

Most websites glossed over this, but we didn’t. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that’s it. So… Silverlight is dead – long live Silerlight?

ZDNet got a chance to speak with Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President overseeing Redmond’s server and tools business, and he was pretty clear about it: Silverlight is Windows Phone’s development platform, while anything cross-platform on the web will be all HTML5, all the time.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.

Good news for HTML5, I suppose, and for the web as a whole, of course. Silverlight made no sense anyway, since it’s pretty much Windows-only; Moonlight barely works, and the Mac version didn’t really go down well either.

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