Today an enthusiastic soul posted a link to the MS Support website, proclaiming that Silverlight isn't dead because MS is going to support Silverlight 5 til 2021.
Sounds good? You might want to think about this in more detail.
If you look carefully at the site linked below and read the fine print rather than just the pretty chart, the site actually says 2021 or the support lifecycle of each of the supported browsers, whichever is shorter. (Emphasis mine) When IE 9 is no longer supported you can pretty much consider Silverlight unsupported as well. I doubt IE9 will still be supported in 2021, but I suppose I have been wrong before.
After reading about the Windows 8 changes, metro mode vs. desktop mode and ne'er the twain shall meet, and so little information given at Build for what their plans are for LOB technologies (that may not need tablet support), I am of the opinion that MS is no longer interested in new development of technologies to support LOB apps, and they want to throw all their eggs into competition with iPad. Oh sure, they want you to still use their existing technologies to build LOB apps but I doubt we'll see too much innovation from them in these areas in future. They see Apple making money hand over fist selling apps through the app store, and they want to replicate this business model, even if it is to the detriment of their relationship with the business development community, because your average Joe will spend $2.99 for a small tablet app without even thinking about it, multiple that by a whole lot of average Joe's and the piece of the pie that MS will get out of it (since there is literally NO OTHER WAY to get apps for a Metro tablet besides the app store) and that is a recipe for a lot of income with relatively little expense to MS aside from the logistics of managing app store certification requirements and the store itself.
I see why they are doing it, I can't necessarily fault them for wanting to try, though I think they will have a harder time ousting iPad from the #1 spot than they believe they will, as there is the catch-22 of needing market share for developers to spend resources building Metro apps for the platform and needing apps for consumers to choose Metro over iPad. MS really needs to find a way to incentivize people to develop for Metro pre-launch so that out the door they have sufficient app volume to be attractive to consumers, because without apps, a Metro tablet is not particularly attractive.
Source:http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=10&y=12&c2=12905
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