Serge Jespers (who works for Adobe) spotted that Microsoft employees contributed over $200K to the presidential inauguration and also noted that the inauguration will be streamed over Microsoft Silverlight instead of Flash (Presidential Inaugural Committee picks Silverlight. Rest of the world uses Flash.).
Is there a relation? Or was Silverlight chosen simply because it was the better choice?
The main goal for the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) should be to make the inauguration broadcast accessible for as much of the nation's population as possible. Given that, I find it difficult to justify that Silverlight, with about a 16% penetration rate for version 1+ could have been chosen over Flash, which has over 95% penetration for version 9+. (I could not find other independent statistics for Silverlight as it doesn't appear that Microsoft publishes independent penetration rate statistics like Adobe does.)
I also find it interesting that Connie Ballmer (Steve Ballmer's wife) donated $50,000 but is listed as "unemployed" (so her contribution doesn't appear, at a glance, to be linked to Microsoft). The Ballmer household, alone, contributed $100K.
Now when you look at the aggregate numbers, the $200K contributed by Microsoft employees forms a little over 0.5% of the total donations (which, as of this time, stand at $35,321,179). However, it would be interesting to know what other assistance or subsidies, if any, PIC received from Microsoft.
All this said, I do feel that Adobe has to realize that it is playing with the big boys now. Adobe is no Microsoft but it's not a mom and pop shop either. We're talking about a billion dollar company facing off against multi-billion dollar company. I can only assume that while Microsoft did everything possible to make it financially and logistically painless for PIC to use Silverlight. I'd love to know what, if anything, Adobe did.
I get the feeling that Adobe is entirely confident that they have an unassailable lead with Flash. And they may be right. But Microsoft is hungry. Microsoft is always hungry. Steve "we keep on coming and coming and coming" Ballmer is starving. He wants what Adobe has with Flash and he's not going to stop until either he gets it, or destroys Flash, or has a heart attack.
Anyone making a purely technical decision between Flash and Silverlight today would not go with Silverlight based on the penetration rates alone. However, these decisions are not purely technical and people are choosing Silverlight. Microsoft, for its part, is doing whatever it can to make it painless to use Silverlight to stream the defining events of our era (first the Beijing Olympics and now the Obama inauguration). It may not lead to much but I feel that Adobe needs to be more active to maintain, and heck, why not, even expand the reach of Flash.
(And it's not just Silverlight that Adobe has to worry about: there are glimpses of far more interesting, and potentially more disruptive technologies around such as Unity.)
Yes, Adobe, you have the better technology. But this is Microsoft we're talking about. They don't succeed by having better technology but through shrewd business practices. OS X is the better technology and yet nearly 90% of computers still run Windows.
C'mon, Adobe... get in the game, and try to make it as easy as possible for these sorts of monumental events to use Flash. Think of it as an investment in the future of Flash, even if it does sacrifice some short-term profit.
All this aside, you can't imagine how relieved, and delighted I am that Obama is taking office tomorrow. Silverlight or no, I can only hope that he is the silver lining of the dark cloud that was the Bush catastrophe of the last eight years and that we have brighter skies and sunshine to look forward to in the next eight (of course eight, what do you think?) Now if only we had an Obama in the UK... I don't even know where you would start! :)
The Microsoft employees donate over $200,000 to Presidential Inauguration. Event to be broadcast via Silverlight. article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Whilest this website (http://inaugural.senate.gov/index.cfm) is brought to you by ColdFusion and Flash ;-)
bring it on! Flash needs some competition, I’m not saying it isn’t a great product but it could be pushed harder.
Silverlight may be very far from the penetration of flash but what it’s doing is turning the many .net developers into RIA developers. I know plenty of people who kept meaning to have a go at flash but never got round to it, and are now going straight to silverlight because they’re comfortable with the tools and languages.
No one thought the XBOX had a chance against the Playstation. MS are going to give adobe a serious run for their money.
@Thom: remember you’re talking to oral balkan. The guy who thinks right but sayw wrong.
how come you are so excited to have obama in office? What is going to be so different about him? He ran a campaign for 2 years about cutting spending and change was coming, and all that fun stuff. Yet before he even gets into office he has already made plans to spend upwards of a trillion dollars to fix our economy even though all this stupid spending is the reason we are in this place to begin with.
I am not a fan of bush either nor was I a fan of mccain, but I just think it’s funny that everyone seems to think Obama is some saving grace when his voting history and his actions to date make him no different than what we have been dealing with for the last 8 years. He will keep the war going, he will keep spending money more and more money, he will make our government as big as it has ever been, he will be coming into office with the most power a president has ever had (thanks to the bush administration) and he will makes things worse. The only real positive is that bush is out of office, the bad news is that bush is kind of still in office.
campaignforliberty.com
Regarding silverlight, MS is obviously paying lots of money to keep it alive and competitive and I think it will definitely give adobe a bigger challenge than they thought. Look how sony pulled blu-ray out from its grave. It’s a shame because Flash is obviously a better technology and more people have access to it, but Adobe is just too used to be being top dog. They should provide a way for .net developers to get into flash. I know there was a product called xamlon that allowed that, but i haven’t heard much about it in the last few years.
@Jacob: I’m waiting for people to understand that Silverlight is actually for completly different market than Flash.
I think Flash has a big advantage in contrast to Silverlight. Most .NET developers (VB and C#) aren’t designers and having more trouble in designing things that good. As long designers will keep on using Flash and Adobe and Flash developers will develop new opportunities for the Flash platform. Silverlight will still have a strong opponent.
Peter, even if SL would be a competitor to Flash (and it is not) it would compete with flex.
And yes, majority of good designers are not even average developers. I would personally love to see cooperation between MS and Adobe in deluvering full designer/developer workflow and tooling, MS focused on back end and adobe on design and UI.
@radekg how is silverlight targeted at a different market than flash? Everything done in silverlight can be done in flash… in most cases it can be done better in flash.
Well, both events were a major play by Microsoft…and in business it is called investment.
It will be a nice war between Adobe and Microsoft, and sincerely, we will profit with it.
It’s funny though, Adobe Evangelists complains about Silverlight and the .NET developers becoming RIA Developers, but isnt Adobe trying to gain some market on Desktop Developmet with AIR ? Do we hear Microsoft complaining ?
Come on, we all are grown ups…a designer WILL NEVER BE a developer, and a developer WILL NEVER BE a designer…we must work together.
Aral,
Are you actually believing all of this rubbish or is this just a pre-cursor to a punchline of some sort? Serge Jespers is definately the go-to guy for the real story afterall, as what could possibly lend bias to his arguments after all?
As let me echo back what i’m translating. You’re stating that Steve Ballmer is willing to put the entire Microsoft brand at risk in order to land a Silverlight streaming deal which at the end of the day is one of many we’ve successfully landed in the past just to rub Adobe’s noses in it all?
You give Steve way too much credit :)
OR.. just a crazy crazy thought popping into the old head, maybe with the success of the democratic national convention, folks liked what they saw on all fronts and simply agreed that a Silverlight HD streaming video is a better bet in this regard than a SD streaming via Flash?
You’re also assuming that folks aren’t willing to install a plugin? be sure to pass that onto Adobe whom every day convince 8-18million people to do just that on AVERAGE.
Can anyone do their homework in this Adobe vs Microsoft battle for once? it’s just really immature with the usual rants from Adobe spending energy disproving Silverlight is successful, meanwhile again, we continue to gain more in success? which they then echo and spend even more time rejecting the successes we’re not supposed to accept.. it’s like a really poorly written Monty Python skit?
It’s an amazing thing to watch from my perspective anyway.
-
Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
Microsoft.
Choosing SL for live event broadcasting probably has more to do with the maturity of Windows Media format tooling and workflow maturity. Do you know of any really big live events that used FMLE and FMS to stream? The ones I’ve read about have used Wowza and Kulayte XStream software, not Adobe’s. There probably is just not enough knowhow around to pull off live flash streaming on this scale.
@Scott
Can you list the advantages of using Silverlight over Flash in this user case. Both are capable of displaying video so why choose one over the other?
If there are no real advantages, then surely the sensible business decision would be to use the player that is most ubiquitous?
@Scott: Can you please list, ideally in bullet points, exactly which parts of the post you consider “rubbish” and why?
Regarding the facts in the post, I did not take Serge’s numbers. My post clearly states that Serge works for Adobe. His bias is public. I scraped the data in the inauguration site and did my own calculations.
Do you disagree with any of the numbers? If so, which ones?
Finally, are you willing to disclose whether or not Microsoft is actually handling the streaming and whether or not they built it for the inauguration committee?
Microsoft is known to offer its services and products for free, or even to pay people to use them (see Windows in third-world countries). So donations, etc., from Ballmer and co., would be nothing out of the ordinary insofar as business practices go for Microsoft. I’d be more interested in knowing if Microsoft is still building Silverlight solutions for events like this for free or paying other companies to use Silverlight like it was in the early days.
I don’t see what you find so unbelievable about the post. Can you clarify your objections with some facts?
@Tink
1) Productivity in software development. Compare Visual Studio with Flex Builder or Flash IDE
2) Streaming servers. How many servers are needed and how easy to manage them. Compare MS products with Adobe products in this area.
3) DRM. Content providers want to ensure the delivery of their contents is rewarding and at low cost. MS and Adobe, which side is better and cheaper?
Scott Barnes is a bit brusque, but hits the nail on the head. I watched some of the Democratic National Convention footage last year using Silverlight in Safari on OS X. The quality of the video stream was excellent. I’ve got no preference for Silverlight or Flash. I’d quite like both to go away and be replaced with in-browser, DRM free Ogg Vorbis and Theora using nothing more than HTML and JavaScript. Until that happens, I think Silverlight is a necessary evil.
Oh, and you want one fairly insignificant reason why I am enjoying the success of Obama (beyond the obvious gladness I have that tomorrow we will not be saying “Vice-President Sarah Palin”): the typography and design. Obama’s printed and web materials have had beautiful design – well-set typography, well-chosen colours. Obama is the Steve Jobs of politics.
GOBAMA!
I will leave no other comment as to what is going on in comments. I don’t like M$, I’ve used Adobe products all my life even when some of them were still Macromedia. Designers can be developers. Here’s a link for interest sake http://www.shinedraw.com/about (how do make these things links?)
Aral,
Did you know that Netflix is also pushing Silverlight. If you want to watch a Netflix film streamed to your Mac (and I believe PC’s also) you need to install Silverlight. Slowly but surely Microsoft is wedging it’s way in.
Aral,
RE: Bullet Points.
Firstly, I found the entire post to have little substance or cite realistic evidence. All you’ve done is taken the usual Adobe feed ubiquity is the only measurement for success rant and then twisted it to suite your conspiracy theory on how our CEO + Wife bought the PIC committee for a solid $100k to win Silverlight.
In which case, I’d simply respond with – Do your homework more.
RE: Numbers.
I don’t have to agree or disagree with the numbers, I only have to point you to Adobe Staffers blogs whom on one hand cite that 4500 people are a representative of the web which are then cross-referenced against “house hold” connected computer’s census data. Whom also don’t disqualify the 4500 folks sampled if they are found at work.
To which they then declare based off this sample, 90%+ ubiquity.
Ok, it’s a bit sketchy but I’m almost onboard with that math, that is until they then announce that between 8-18million people per day are installing Flash. Furthermore, 80% of these users do so via the adobe.com website?
Now 1.4billion people are online, do the math and when you’ve gotten past that kool-aid detox, come back and we can have a rationale conversation about ubiquity vs perception.
RE: Handling the Streaming.
I’ve got no knowledge as to whether or not we are hosting the streams, nothing I’ve seen internally indicates it’s all us pulling the levers.
RE: Services / Free etc.
Welcome to the world of commerce. Adobe are just as equally guilty of doing not only this but actively biding to counter-offer our wins post delivery.
The XDR Team are a prime example of this, whereby you have 12 folks in a team dedicated to working on prospective wins within Adobe’s clientele (i.e. New York Times app built in Flash etc).
Matt Voerman a consultant in Adobe, flew from Australia to the US to work on the MSNBC NFL “win” for Adobe. Like I said, holding us out to dry on the notion that we’re up to no good by this, is actually not fair.
Especially given the MSNBC Olympics success we had with Silverlight, as what folks need to also understand is that actually made profit for all parties involved. Nobody absorbed the costs.
RE: Ballmer influence.
You’re taking a random piece of evidence and tying it to your conspiracy theory. The two are separate entities from this discussion and the PIC folks based their decisions off of the success had with the Democratic National Convention. Again, something you conveniently left out in which I hope it was only done due to ignorance of the event? If that being the case, then clearly you’re not doing your homework.
[...] > Aral Balkan – Microsoft employees donate over $200,000 to Presidential Inauguration. Event to b… [...]
[...] vozes, pró-Adobe e até mesmo de funcionários da Adobe, se levantaram sobre a hipótese da Microsoft ter [...]