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Source: Sparkling Client

Scott Barnes Interview

• Silverlight was much more popular than expected.
• Silverlight isn’t going anywhere 
• Enterprise adoption has been crazy good.
• Is the “WPF replaced by HTML5″ thought even a possibility? It sounds like such a weird idea.
  
  • The core problem is that the ranks of .NET developers isn’t growing.
  • PHP is the 800 lb gorilla inside of Microsoft – what to do?
  • How can more developers be brought onto the Microsoft stack?

Just like a hooker, your job is to entice the person before you to take faith in the hopeful reality that this will be an experience to remember (ok that analogy just took a nose dive in very bad way). Your job is to firstly convince the end user to install Silverlight should it not be in place and secondly and just as importantly your job is to convince the end user that sticking around is also equally important SHOULD they have the installation in place of Silverlight.

When I was in the Silverlight Product team, I had many visions of where I wanted to take the product beyond where some of my co-team mates were comfortable with (slow painful incremental growth in terms of change).

One of the main focal areas I wanted to fix, was the overall Installation and Preloading Experiences for Silverlight. In that, i think it’s essentially the like the IRAQ war of software (i.e. meaning, its so far embedded now that fixing it is going to take generations of change).