Will Silverlight 2 Succeed Where Netscape Plugins and Java Applets Failed

Question

My company sells spreadsheet components which are used in a variety of ASP.NET and Windows Forms applications.

We frequently get an email or a phone call asking "Can we use your product to let our users view / edit / print / etc... this Excel spreadsheet that my boss gave me, in the browser?"

Our answer is something like "Not exactly. You could use our Windows Forms control inside of a User Control in Internet Explorer, but we don't recommend it because it requires the modification of security options on every client. We've looked at using AJAX to build an editable Excel compatible spreadsheet for the browser, but we don't believe we can build something in AJAX that we would want to use so we're not going to try. You could use our component on your ASP.NET server to load, modify, calculate and get results and even images of charts and ranges, but this is far from an editable spreadsheet and requires you to write ASP.NET code for the UI. We've been watching Silverlight with great interest since it was first announced at PDC as WPF/E and we think this is what we'll eventually do."

Now, I've thought that doing a "real" spreadsheet in the browser was a good idea for a long time. I led the development of a Netscape Navigator plugin spreadsheet component called Formula One/NET in 1996. Formula One/NET was the first spreadsheet which ran in a browser as far as I know and we had high hopes for it. Formula One/ActiveX ran in the browser soon after. Two years later, we released Formula One for Java which included a Java Applet. But Netscape Navigator is gone, Java Applets had only limited success (at least in business), Formula One is now known as Actuate e.Spreadsheet and I left Actuate in 2002 because they had no interest in building products for .NET.

So, we're probably going start on a Silverlight product later this year. It just makes sense. But I've got that nagging doubt because of my past experience and I wonder:

Is Silverlight the way to go here? Is Silverlight really going to be big in business?

I'm pretty sure that Silverlight is our best option - especially taking into account the fact that our core engine is all C#. But it would be nice to hear some confirmation regarding the viability of Silverlight in business.

Answer 1

I suspect Silverlight is likely enough to be popular to make it worth doing. There are no guarantees, but:

• Sun, Microsoft and Adobe all think that RIA a sufficiently useful area to be investing in it.
• With an existing codebase in C#, Silverlight is probably going to be a lot less work for you than the alternatives.
• If you don't do it, one of your competitors probably will.
• It'll be a lot of fun to try, I'm sure :)

There are never any guarantees of success in business, but this doesn't sound like an unreasonable gamble to me. If you'd been talking about doing it in Silverlight 1 of course, that would have been a different story :)

Answer 2

One strong indicator would be whether you've found it worthwhile to port to Flex, since it's functionally equivalent and will enjoy much higher market acceptance for at least a year or two.

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EDIT: Flex vs. Silverlight comparisons

I just picked the first several that came up on Google and were interesting and relatively recent - no opinion about accuracy, not sufficient to draw conclusions - but the concensus seems to be that neither technology runs away with the prize. Anyone is free to edit or add to this post with more and/or better information.

First link (Some measurements) Second link (A gallery of demos implemented in tandem for direct comparison) Third link (A bunch of posts listing various reactions to above from various people)

Answer 3

Java applets are still in use, and have much wider support today than Silverlight probably ever will.

It seems to me though that Flash has already settled in comfortably all over the land where Silverlight wishes to travel. Even though Silverlight is technically better the benefits are too marginal for it to gain any real traction in the long term.

Answer 4

The question should be, will Silverlight ever dominate over flash. Give the poor uptake of ActiveX, this does seem unlikely.

Answer 5

Silverlight will win as soon as MS engineers figure out a simpler path to the database. Currently a Silverlight programmer has to create a web service that performs SQL queries on behalf of clients and returns DataSets and other results.

The reason MS has always succeeded in the past is that they made it stupid simple to access their databases from their IDEs. Sure, it's not a clean and "proper" way to go but i'd be willing to bet that there is a significant percentage of business applications out there that are strongly bound from the UI to a MS db backend of some sort, be it Access, Foxpro or even Sql Server.

On another note, Silverlight is much more closely related in concept to Java applets than ActiveX. And in reality neither of those technologies had much uptake. Both are still around but ActiveX presents a massive security issue and Java applets, for one reason or another, never took hold. It might have been the less-than stellar UI or that it was just too hard for your average developer to do something neat with it. For example, just as with Silverlight today, to connect a biz app to a db back end required a number of steps and Sun never thought it necessary to create stupid simple IDEs with drag-drop data binding functionality.