Microsoft moves away from Silverlight

This.

Frustration is likely the main word from the poor souls who've put in
serious amounts of time to become proficient with Expression Studio
(Blend) and the intricacies of Microsoft's Silverlight. Mary Jo
Foley
has a post up today where she interviews Bob Muglia, the Microsoft
President in charge of the company’s server and tools business. He
basically says the company is moving away from Silverlight in the web
space and the desktop space, but “Silverlight is our development
platform for Windows
Phone.”

I took an introductory class in VB.NET last semester and was
very intrigued by Silverlight, XAML and the way it seemed that
Microsoft was aggressively pushing Expression Studio and Silverlight
versions. I say "seemed" because its now obvious that Microsoft is
losing its interest in Silverlight as a serious contender to Adobe's
Flash and HTML 5. I'm a bit befuddled by this bit of news as the W3
consortium doesn't
think
HTML5 is ready for prime-time and Flash has taken several bad PR shots
to the chin as of late.

Is Microsoft giving up too soon? I have no idea, maybe? I will tell you
that I was seriously interested in
really learning C# and
Silverlight development, but a series of related news items have forced
me to rethink this position. Javascript, Python, Java and Ruby are
really starting to look worthy of a serious investment in time. If I
had 5,000 hours invested in Silverlight development, I'd be half-passed
extremely angry with Microsoft right now... especially given the
Silverlight hype machine they've created in the last few years. I
seriously feel bad for these developers as all of a sudden, the focus
changes and the path moves. The developer is left in a lurch...
press-on, adapt and overcome OR start over.

To me its that simple, but I'm not a sophisticated developer with years
of experience. Maybe the Silverlight dev. can carve out a niche and make
some money, but for how long? Furthermore, what if the Win7 phone
is received like the Microsoft
Kin. I'm not
in a position to say whether Win7 phone will be successful or not (I
hope it is as Android and iOS need more competition). That all said, a
simple exercise in objective pragmatism must lead one to seriously
consider all of the possible situations which can be conceptualized.
Will Microsoft totally abandon Silverlight sometime in the future?
After three years and relatively low adoption
rates, is it better to cut one's losses and
press-on to another technology?

According to RIA Stats, Silverlight plugin penetration is a bit better
than half on the big four browsers. Ok, what about sites that employ
Silverlight to deliver content? I couldn't find an authoritive place to
research such data, so lets get all hot and subjective. Its basic and
within the Microsoft sphere, Silverlight is used on a few applications
that are truly impressive. Day-to-day video and music media delivery is
still firmly in Flash's backyard. Line of business applications from the
cloud are a potential bright spot for Silverlight.

I wonder how many companies will hesitate to make a long-term
Silverlight commitment because of the news today? Windows Azure supports
popular standards, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML,
Java, PHP and Ruby. Why fiddle with Silverlight when Microsoft's own
cloud supports such a diverse range of languages? How long has Microsoft
known they were not in the "game" with Silverlight? Could they have
released this information a year ago?

Lots of questions need to be answered.