In his article Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins Jonathan Allen argues that Microsoft has effectively made a decision against Silverlight (as well as Flash and every other plugin running in Internet Explorer today) by announcing yesterday, that Internet Explorer 10 (*) on Windows 8 will not run any plugins – in Metro mode (which is the cool name for what we will identify soon as the new Windows look). Plugins are still supported in the so-called Desktop mode, which is basically what we all look at today.
Creating and more importantly, actually placing new technology in a market always is difficult. And breaking broadly used habits even more. I remember when Apple abandoned serial and parallel interfaces and only offered USB to connect printers and other devices. I could not believe it. Magazines were full of negative comments. Many people expected this to break Apple’s neck. Today most people are very happy about this step.
Microsoft apparently is trying something similar – cutting off too old and heavy legacy technology. Stop trying to be compatible with every single age old technology … kind of. It’s a bit like Dr. Faustus in Goethe’s epic who laments to the ghosts and when the ghost finally shows up to help, Faust rather would have him go, but can’t make him go. So, just looking at my clients this one thing might turn out to be a show stopper for a short term Windows 8 upgrade.
I’m just thinking of one big migration project where Internet Explorer was a major pain in the neck, because so many applications where in some way or another dependent on some aspect of IE, so that when IE 9 came out, even the brief thought of migrating to that version was killed in an instant – the client would have to invest weeks and months of testing a few dozen applications … for what?
Will big companies just keep using old style IE like some still use IE6? Will it take another five to ten years, until Flash, Silverlight, etc. are gone? … or is this a business opportunity for some smart kid to figure out how to easily transform those plugins into HTML5?
It’s a bold step, Microsoft is taking and I am sure on the long run we all will benefit. The question just is how long and painful that run will be.
(*) Note: this link most likely is a temporary link that will either be taken down by Microsoft or will be used for other content in the future.
