Silverlight debacle coming to the cloud applications world?

Just read an interesting article on the Microsoft Dynamics Community website - Microsoft Dynamics GP 12's Silverlight Plans Unchanged Despite Windows 8 Plug-In Limitations - which connects the dots in a way that had not been on my radar yet.

I knew that SAP had chosen Microsoft Silverlight as the technology for building out the user interface for Business by Design. 

I also knew Microsoft was using Silverlight as the way to start to "cloudify" it's Dynamics product lines. As recently as April of this year, the Dynamics team Microsoft was telling people Silverlight is our Key for Cloud Credibility. 

But here's the problem - in the consumer world of 2011, Apple, Google, Facebook and now even Microsoft have decided that Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight aren't cool anymore - and a newer technology called HTML 5 is the answer for rich web applications.  

Late last year we started seeing the Microsoft operating system and web browser teams start to move away from Silverlight and to embrace HTML 5 - see stories  here, here, and here.

As Microsoft have begun to further disclose their plans for Windows 8, the volume got even louder.The thread discussing this on the Windows 8 web forum got close to 200 posts from Silverlight developers freaking out before it was locked - and it now has more than 7 million views.

The most current Microsoft position appears to be that Silverlight will not work in Internet Explorer 10 or the new user interface of Windows 8 - and forget tablet/mobile usage, since neither Apple or Google have Silverlight plug-ins on their tablets or smart phones.

Which leaves the users of these applications in an interesting bind, as noted in the original article - don't upgrade to Windows 8 or IE 10 and you'll be just fine. No wonder the development community is freaking out. According to ZDNet - It definitely seems Microsoft’s ultimate goal is to wean developers off Silverlight and to convince them to use HTML5 and JavaScript to write new apps for Windows, going forward.

This really highlights the risks of using proprietary technologies when building cloud applications. While it may not be a big deal for some consumer website to shift their on-line video player from Silverlight to HTML 5 - from an enterprise application developer point of view it means a complete re-write of a large part of your applications.

The lesson - when building cloud apps take great care to use only open web standards - and when evaluating cloud apps make sure the vendor isn't using any proprietary technologies like Silverlight that will lock you into or out of any particular platform - the whole point of cloud computing is to free you to work from anywhere, anytime and on any device you choose.

I bet we will all be hearing more about this soon - its certainly sounds like a budding debacle to me. There is also considerable irony that the Microsoft Dynamics GP team bet on a technology that appears to be being abandoned by the Microsoft Windows and Browser teams - but that's just piling on...