Perfect Sense: Microsoft Silverlight on Microsoft Mobile

With all of the success of the iPhone and the hype of the Android, Microsoft is still figuring out what to do in the mobile space. Something worthwhile, that is.

If there’s one thing everyone can learn from the iPhone, it’s the applications that make it great. The iPhone went from initially being just a really cool phone (Apple is great at making cool things) to being a very functional, useful, and practical device. Just ask any iPhone user and they’ll tell you what their favorite application is, and rarely is it an application that has anything to do with a phone or playing music.

So where does it leave Microsoft? In a recent article on ChannelWeb, it’s now rumored that Silverlight will run on Windows Mobile devices. Specifically, Windows Mobile 7, or whatever it is they decide to name it.

Why is this a good thing? Because it will open the floodgates to allow millions of .NET programmers to create applications for Windows Mobile.

Silverlight, much like Flash, will allow people to share code across multiple devices. This is powerful, so much so, that Apple does not allow Flash to run on the iPhone.

Silverlight is so much better that Flash (from a development standpoint), that people have been saying that Silverlight is a Flash killer for a while now. I’m not sure if that’s happened yet, and Adobe may very well kill Flash on their own without anyone’s help.

It’s the applications that make hardware wonderful, and the ease at which those applications can be developed that makes them widely available. Microsoft has all the right cards here, as their Visual Studio Development tools are second to none. There’s already plenty of .NET developers out there, and along with that, Silverlight developers.

So, you take a .NET developer with some Silverlight experience, and almost overnight you could have yourself a new Windows Mobile Developer. With Silverlight becoming more integrated with SharePoint, you would have a developer who program your website, SharePoint site, and mobile site all in the same day.

It’s anyone’s guess how the iPhone will play out in Corporate America. Apple makes you deploy all of your applications through their App Store, or buy their special server to allow for deployments internally in a corporation with more than 500 users. Either way the licensing doesn’t give you all the freedom that corporations currently have to deploy whatever they want on a desktop PC.

So along comes Windows Mobile 7, finally, with a nice development platform that allows companies to deploy internal applications whenever they want on whatever phones they want.

Microsoft may be on to something here.

Advertisement