上一周在微软PDC会议上，Bob Muglia说“our strategy has shifted”，在业界引起了一些波澜。
下面的这篇文章算是一个回应吧，我抽空翻译了一下，欢迎指正。
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It has been a wild weekend for sure. A slew of important announcements at PDC, sudden withdrawal of all Silverlight sessions, Bob Muglia’s statement about Microsoft’s change in plans, the uptake from journalists, the community uproar... A comedy of errors was unfolding in the technology space while I was happily spending my weekend enjoying my kid’s birthday and not thinking about dev platforms.
这确实是一个疯狂的周末，在PDC上有很多重要的消息被发布，包括几乎所有关于Silverlight课程的突然取消，以及Bob Muglia的关于微软对Silverlight计划变更的消息，通过记者的宣传引起了社区的一片哗然。一场黑色幽默就此展开，而我正在庆祝我孩子的生日，并没有关注这些。
So, I come in the office today and my inbox is blinking like crazy, mails from a ton of people from inside the company and out and the common question is – what are you/we doing with Silverlight? Is this the beginning of the end? Are we going to abandon Silverlight now that it was declared dead? Is HTML5 the future of web development?
当我回到办公室的时候，我的邮件箱疯狂的闪烁，无数来自公司内外的人们给我发来邮件。他们共同关注的问题是：我们该怎么办，难道这就是Silverlight结束的开始吗，难道我们现在就要放弃Silverlight吗，还是等待他的死亡？HTML5是Web开发的未来吗？
In short - we love Silverlight, our customers love it and we don’t see it dying, nor will we abandon it. Silverlight might benefit from some
improvements, but is not dead and will not die that easily. It might not be the “premier” UI technology of Microsoft (whatever that means, I never really understood that message) but it will thrive in many types of applications. Perhaps Microsoft raised the expectations too high when they announced Silverlight a few years ago and its benefits were blown out of proportion. I guess many people expected that there would be nothing but Silverlight.
简短来说，我们喜爱Silverlight，我们的客户也爱它，我们都不希望看着这个技术消亡，也不会放弃它。可能Silverlight需要更多的提升，但是Silverlight不会死，也不会那么容易死。Silverlight可能不是微软第一位的UI呈现技术，但是它仍然会蓬勃发展。可能微软在数年前推出Silverlight技术的时候，对它期望过高，也夸大了一些优点。
Just like now I am defending Silverlight and building a case for it, back then I was building a case for HTML and JavaScript. Many people were trying to convince me that Flash and Silverlight will dominate the world and that HTML will disappear. Thing is, HTML is like WinForms. It will be around till the end of the world. It survived and is coming back stronger than before. I believe the same will happen with Silverlight. We’ll see, time will tell. While Microsoft has marginalized many of its own “children” in the past, it has also changed its initial course many times based on market/community pressure.
正像我现在正依赖于Silverlight来构建一些Web应用，以前我会使用HTML和JavaScript，当时很多人都跟我讲Flash和Silverlight将会统治整个世界，HTML会消失。但是事实是HTML就像WinForm一样，一直会存活到现在，而且更加的茁壮。我相信同样的事情会发生在Silverlight身上，我们能够看到，时间会证明一切。虽然微软也曾边缘化了许多他自己的技术，但是他也曾由于市场或者社区的压力而多次改变自己在PDC上设定的议题。
While you could argue forever who is going to “win,” I don’t really understand why people put HTML5 and Silverlight in the same basket and don’t separate the future of Silverlight from the future of the internet. In a way, it feels like people talking about a championship clash between New York Yankees and Manchester United. True, both teams play sports, both of them are great, but… they don’t compete in the same sport. So it’s kinda’ difficult for them to have a face-off so that you have a clear winner.
你可能还要争论到底谁是最后的赢家，我确实不能理解人们为什么会把Silverlight和HTML5对立起来，而不能把Silverlight的未来与Internet的未来分开来看。换句话说，就像是人们在讨论纽约YanKees队与曼联队谁才是真正的冠军一样，的确他们都是运动队，都是杰出的，但是不能把他们放在一个项目中进行比较，无法进行一次竞赛来确定一个更杰出的冠军。
This brings me to my main point – Yankees fans do not want to watch another sport when their favorite baseball team is playing (the same applies to Man Utd soccer fans) any more than developers want to use another technology when they like the one they’re using. HTML5 and Silverlight may both be development platforms, but they have very different approaches and they appeal to different audiences, hence they don’t really “compete” for the same championship.
这就是我的主要观点：Yankees队的粉丝并不想看到他们的球队去比一场棒球以外的比赛，同样曼联的球迷也是一样的。开发人员也会根据实际场景选择合适的技术，HTML5和Silverlight都是基础的开发平台，但是他们会用不同的方式来吸引不同的受众，因为他们并不是为了同一个冠军在竞争。
I hope you are not shocked! That’s what our data shows – web devs never picked up Silverlight as their platform of choice. They always stayed close to what they felt most comfortable with – JS, HTML, CSS, AJAX. Sure, they suffered from cross-browser issues due to the fact that every browser has its take on how “standard” features should be implemented, but they stayed true to pure web development and never embraced Flash or Silverlight.
我希望你没有受到震动。Web的开发人员永远不会选择Silverlight作为其开发平台，他们还会选择非常熟悉，感觉非常舒服的JavaScript，HTML，CSS还有AJAX。尽管由于多种浏览器在实现标准上并不完全一致，他们深受多浏览器之苦，但是他们还会继续呆在纯正的Web开发平台之上而不会选择Silverlight。
On the other hand, our data shows that Silverlight appeals mostly to people coming from the WinForms world. For them, it’s the transition from WinForms to the next-generation world. Silverlight might be the super media platform, but most of our customers are not using it for that and don’t appreciate it for the HD streaming. These people were doing WinForms development and were looking for ways to enjoy richer functionality and simpler deployment of the backbone apps of their organizations. They found the Silver bullet and saw the light! With the blossoming of Silverlight, I think we finally get the best of both worlds when it comes to LOB – the ubiquity of the browser, the rich experience, the online and offline scenarios, and the great languages and tooling (well, that’s as of recently and we could definitely use some improvements).
从另外一个角度来讲，数据显示Silverlight吸引了更多有着WinForm世界的开发人员，对于他们而言，这只是由WinForm到下一代客户端技术的转变。Silverlight可能是一个非常好的多媒体平台，支持高清的Video，但是大多数用户并没有基于这点来使用它。他们还在做着WinForm开发，他们期待着为他们的组织找到一种具有丰富功能，并且容易发布的应用程序开发平台。他们发现了“银箭”，令人炫目的Silverlight。我想最终我们会得到的，具有丰富的体验，支持在线以及离线场景，多语言支持等等。
Further, I don’t think that you can build with HTML what you can build with Silverlight with the same effort. You can build amazing stuff with any
technology if you are a great developer and you know the domain. The real problem, and hence test, for any developer technology is how easily it enables less experienced devs to deliver amazing results. In my opinion, SL’s threshold is pretty low and it has the best cost/value, especially when you are talking about internal applications of medium size and complexity and up.
另外我并不认为在同等的投入下使用HTML可以构建出与使用Silverlight一样的东西。如果你是一个很好的开发人员的话，并且你通晓这个领域，使用任何技术你都可以构建出让人惊艳的作品。实际的问题是对于任何一项技术，我们要看缺少经验的开发人员是不是做出非常好的作品。在我看来，SL的门槛是相当低，具有最佳的成本价值比，特别是当你做公司内部的中等规模的应用时候。
Silverlight will become dead if and only the hundreds of thousands or millions of devs who are doing desktop apps today decide that writing JavaScript is cool and that they can achieve more with HTML5-capable browsers, tooling and platforms than with Silverlight or some other similar technology. I honestly don’t see that happening, though, and believe in the merits of SL when it comes to development of heavy-duty LOB apps for the Enterprise.
如果今天有几十万或几百万的桌面应用程序开发人员决得写JavaScript是非常Cool的，使用HTML可以更好的与浏览器兼容，并且有更好的工具和平台支持的话，那么Silverlight的确会死。但是我没有看到这种情况，并且我相信基于Silverlight的优势，Silverlight会进入到广泛的企业级应用。
As a short summary - have no fear, dear customers. We plan to continue investing heavily in both HTML5/CSS and Silverlight; stay tuned to our Silverlight team blog for regular roadmap updates. You know you can count on Telerik to follow the latest development trends and your needs. Last week we introduced Windows Phone 7 suite (1st in industry!) and you can be assured we will be there for you for HTML5, too (stay tuned to Telerik blogs for more on that soon). We will not “retire” WPF or WinForms; just see what we are delivering to you next week with the Q3 2010 release (WPF, WinForms). We are an infrastructure provider so whatever the market needs, that we will deliver. We believe that customers should be the ones to decide what to use and when. Our responsibility, and business, is to provide them with the absolutely best
tools no matter whether we get tail of headwind from Microsoft and we will stay committed to everything we have started.
简短总结一下，亲爱的客户你们无须担心，我们会同时将重点放在HTML5，CSS以及Silverlight上。继续关注我们的Silverlight Blog，你将能够知道我们会继续跟踪最新的技术进展。
And a closing word of advice – choose your tools based on your skillset and your company’s needs rather than on emotions based on mass hysteria.
最后提供一个建议:根据你的经验以及公司的需要选择技术,而不是依赖于感觉，甚至是歇斯底里的感觉。
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引用InfoQ的话来讲应该是：Silverlight面向客户端，HTML5面向Web。