Thoughts on Moonlight, Silverlight, and Flash

Posted under Blog Posts, Healthcare I.T., Software Design

“Moonlight” is an open-source project attempting to implement a clone of Microsoft Silverlight on Linux.  This is great news for me (and other developers) faced with self-doubt regarding our continued allegiance to the Microsoft development platforms surrounding .NET.  This is also bad news for the Adobe Flash camp hoping to maintain a monopoly on the scaling vector graphics (SVG) market.

Funny how the business side of software must treat the minorities (Mac, Linux) with as much respect as the majority (Microsoft Windows).  Funny and true for my company, who looks to woo the sometimes persnickety healthcare market with their desire to use non-Microsoft thin client devices.  Whatever we make, it really needs to be able to run on Opera and/or Firefox on Linux, though very few are ready to implement Linux-based devices within their Microsoft Active Directory authentication infrastructure.  That’s been my experience, anyway.

Allow me to apply my  “curse” on Microsoft by predicting their victory over Flash within 4 years.  Every time that I have predicted a major upheaval or downfall of a company, the exact opposite has happened.  I am usually right about the little things, but I usually underestimate timelines (or just completely wrong) for the big movements.  Here are two examples:

In 1996, I predicted the downfall of AOL due to the emergence and penetration of cheaper dial-up and the impending high-speed market that promised to bypass AOL.  You know what happened next; Time Warner and AOL in a deal worth a gazillion dollars, and grandparents and other technical know-nothings continued to subscribe to AOL services.  While these events remain baffling to me, they served to postpone the inevitable collapse of AOL, thereby dissolving my prediction.

In 2005, I predicted the end of broadcast music radio due to irrelevance by 2008.  I predicted that time-shifted content and personal media players would forever change the market, and would devastate the broadcast companies.  With only a few months left before the deadline, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen according to my timeline.  I still think that it will happen, but not in the next 12 months.

I reserve the right to continue to make grand pronouncements about the future of tech and entertainment industries.  You continue to have the right to scoff at my proclamations.  Sounds like a perfect relationship!