Silverlight & The Next Generation of Automotive Software

Replies to This ADM Discussion

Permalink Reply by Oova on November 19, 2008 at 9:45pm

agreed on the thousands of MS developers, but can they implement fancy multi thread animations, just because they know how to use the development environment?
No offense, but that is not my experience.

Are SW developers good at designing web, animations, marketing messages, etc.?

Nope, that is why you have hordes of designers/artists, who tell the implementation folks what to do.

There is a very small and expensive crowd of people, who can do great design for the human eye and know how to program that efficiently.

And Silverlight is going to change that?

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 20, 2008 at 7:10am

I agree with you that most developers are not designers.

But you have to think that Silverlight is not targeted strictly at "designing web, animations, marketing messages" it is also target at creating "line of business" applications. These line of business applications are the types of applications that are currently done via HTML or windows forms, not Flash at all. Silverlight is going to make database driven applications faster and easier to use.

Silverlight will find it's immediate home in the IT department making powerful web based data driven business applications. It will be used to make the "back end" of websites and over time great graphics designers will learn to use it for marketing purposes on the "front end".

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 19, 2008 at 5:55pm

You are correct that neither is good for content in regards to SEO. They are fine for navigation or a vehicle builder tool, photo gallery, or other tool.

But Silverlight is actually better for SEO than Flash by my understanding because of how it is designed. Silverlight has a HTML like markup language called XAML that can easily be extracted from its files and potentially indexed in the future by search engines. But I wouldn't recommend either if SEO is important for the page it is on.

Flash isn't going away, but Silverlight will quickly penetrate a market that Flash never has, and that is data drive business applications.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 24, 2008 at 11:00am

Even when using Flash or Silverlight you can still set the meta tags and add additional html to the page for SEO purposes. There are ways of doing it...

For example, I think BZ Results has made a living providing mostly all Flash websites but still doing SEO on them. They just sorta hide text via collapsible panes on the pages.

I probably wouldn't make an entire vehicle display page in Silverlight or Flash though, but that doesn't mean it can't have a cool photo viewer in flash or Silverlight.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 24, 2008 at 11:14am

Well this is a debate all of it's own :-)

The key is whether or not indexed vehicle pages really add any real value for SEO. How many pages are indexed doesn't equate to better or worse search engine rankings.

JD Rucker has a nice post on this topic:
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/jdrucker/2008/11/07/car-inventory-...

SEODigger.com is a nice tool that can show you how many keyphrases a website is actually ranked for, which is way more valuable than how many pages are indexed.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 24, 2008 at 11:25am

I agree that there is value in indexed pages. The more pages indexed, the better chance they could rank, but that doesn't mean they will :-)

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Permalink Reply by George Cresto on November 19, 2008 at 4:03pm

We have also implemented SilverLight technology with our Service Drive Concierge software to display automated arrival information in the Service Drive. More info can be found at http://www.mydealerlot.com/servicedrive2.html .

Also check out http://www.mydealerlot.com/servicedrive.html

The technology is specifically used in the plasma display of rotating customer information on a browser.

George

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 19, 2008 at 5:57pm

Good to see someone else out there on the "bleeding edge"

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 21, 2008 at 1:14pm

Hey George this might be useful for your developers.

http://www.codeplex.com/SilverlightValidator

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Permalink Reply by Randy Cole on November 19, 2008 at 5:44pm

I always like to play devils advocate - so let's have a go at it...

Having worked with Flash since it first came out, as well as hiring and managing many Flash developers and scripters for tons of Flash projects through the years, I would concur that Flash is well embedded into the designer/developer community. However, I think we need to take a long hard look at where I think this could be headed...

Imagine a tool like Silverlight, fueled and supported by a behemoth like Microsoft, becoming so embedded in the business world (online and otherwise) and becoming so user friendly (think 'hands-off') that hundreds of Silverlight modules could possibly put Flash developers out of business.

I use Flash but I still look for 'pre-scripted' Flash apps whenever possible, just to save time. The code is usually solid and I do not want to waste my time - I would rather sell cars than program. And there are plenty of Flash modules already available. These are easy to emulate in Silverlight. Now there's a new cottage industry...

And if we are talking data dashboards for Enterprise data when CEO's and GMs want to parse and play with their data via an EIS (Enterprise Information System) tool like Crystal Reports or others, those Flash tools/modules already exist as well. Again, Silverlight will be making headway in this arena as well.

So, like it or not (and I don't), I personally think the clear winner, over time, is going to be the data or content display 'shell' that is closest to the business world, which happens to be Microsoft's Silverlight.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room right now is Microsoft, They run many of the business office tools around the world, whether we like it or not. I know I am typing on one of them right now. Unfortunately, I don't think Adobe, and the world of designers and Flash developers are going to be able to match the market inroads that Microsoft already has within it's grasp.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 19, 2008 at 6:12pm

The key is Silverlight is focused on a niche that Flash has never really penetrated, and this is dynamic data driven business applications. Flash has always been more for animations, static content, and attractive marketing uses.

You are correct that the Silverlight community will flood it with cool modules. We are getting ready to submit something to the open source community that we created because it will help others.

The most important piece to the Silverlight vs Flash decision from a development and management standpoint is this: Should I hire Microsoft Visual C# developers which can be applied to develop every type of software there is, or should I hire Flash/Flex developers which can't be applied to anything else. Even if you can program in Flash, you have to learn some other technologies to connect it to a database and create an enterprise services platform behind it. I might as well learn one common technology (.NET platform) that can do everything. They don't teach Flash to computer science majors in college... but they do learn about Microsoft .NET

Soon there will be graphic artists learning to use Expression Blend which is the competitor to Flash.

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Permalink Reply by Randy Cole on November 19, 2008 at 6:39pm

Matt - I am glad you put that response up. You covered some of the points I had deleted out of my previous posting because I thought it was getting too long. I did not want to bore anyone.

The analogy I was going to use was that of the people who built and re-built carburetors. When the fuel-injection model came along (i.e., a smarter, more efficient way of delivering the fuel, or data, for the sake of the analogy) many lost their jobs overnight.

The delivery model (for fuel = data) had changed and they were not paying attention - so they were out of business, or at the very least delegated to a second class as newer model cars no longer needed their services.

I also appreciate the fact that Microsoft has gone through a significant paradigm shift in how they create and handle data. Whether we like it or not, the new "Ribbon" interface they introduced with Office 2007 and Vista, was a great way to introduce us to the world of fluid data and the xml world. An MS Word page is no longer 'baked' into the format we are used to - it remains in a fluid state of 'data' until we tell it to print or display as a page.

Having created kiosks for in-store inventory display, I can absolutely see how Silverlight, again, as the interface to the data, is going to be more flexible to work with than Flash. Anyone who has followed and used Flash through the years, has seen how it has gotten much more flexible than it used to be. But in the same light, anyone who has worked with large data bases (and I have), can readily see the strengths that Silverlight is bringing to the table.

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