Silverlight adoption hampered by economic crisis

Microsoft's Silverlight technology has streamed some high-profile live events lately, the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama and the 2008 Summer Olympics among them. But Silverlight's real promise for the business customer -- to improve user interfaces for day-to-day applications -- has been thwarted by tightening budgets.

In a recessionary climate, enterprise IT decision makers are hesitant to adopt new technologies. They are even less likely to adopt ones focused on UI design, which is a low-priority item in the best of times, designers and developers said.

[ Test Center: Microsoft Silverlight 2. ]

"The UI is considered the last part of the application," said Ryan Peterson, principal and software engineer for Serenity Software, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, company that specializes in UI consulting and design. "The mindset has always been and still is: You build the application and then you build the interface. It's a large contributing factor to why people cut that [first]. They think if the application works, we can take care of the interface later."

Creative UI design for years has been primarily limited to the realm of high-impact Web sites and advertising and marketing campaigns. But before the U.S. economy began its nosedive last year, enterprises were beginning to take a closer look at how UI design could actually make them more efficient and save money by giving line-of-business workers better ways to interact with applications.

It was into this environment that Microsoft introduced the 1.0 version of Silverlight in April 2007. The company positioned the cross-browser technology as a competitor to Adobe's Flash multimedia technology for building RIAs (rich Internet applications).

Early on, Microsoft said it would integrate .Net -- the underlying development framework for Microsoft software -- into Silverlight. The integration of .Net would make it easier for developers to create more interesting UIs for business applications and allow them to tie the UI into back-end data stored in other Microsoft-based enterprise applications.

The first version of Silverlight wasn't fully baked, however, and it wasn't until October's release of Silverlight 2 -- .Net framework included -- that developers and designers could really use it to build more interactive UIs and add multimedia to Web-based applications. Unfortunately, the release coincided with enterprises freezing or cutting budgets as the economy faltered.

"IT shops were very interested in (UI design) before all the stuff happened toward the end of last year," said Dave West, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. "They're still interested, but adoption is down."

Ben Dewey, a senior software developer for IT consulting firm twentysix New York who has worked with Silverlight, said Silverlight 2 "was launched at a time when the economy started dropping," which affected its adoption.