Right, but you have to take another step back. As you say, it's good that Microsoft moved away from Silverlight because it didn't gain traction and was wrong for the market.
But before we laud them for moving away from yet another high-profile flop, why didn't it gain traction? Why was it wrong for the market? Because it failed to learn the lessons of the past. It is yet another not-invented-here, one-stack-to-rule-them-all product from Microsoft. It needed developer mindshare and it was going against an entrenched competitor in Flash.
Why was it even begun, amounting to a massive waste of developer time, money, and opportunity cost? That's the real problem at the core of Microsoft. Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, failed projects pad manager resumes on 1 Microsoft Way.
My theory is they wanted some way to get a bit of return on investment from WPF and thus WPF/E which became Silverlight. In 2007 or so who was to know that Apple would have the clout to almost singlehandedly drown RIAs in the bathtub.
Silverlight is really just a pared-down, more portable, and somewhat decruftified version of the .net framework. They probably figured it would be valuable to have such a thing even if the initial "browserplugin" usecase didn't pan out. And in fact it has been.
I would say resources to learning silverlight would be a big reason it hasn't gained traction. After the basics it's a real struggle to work out how to do a heap of things, the answers usually seem to be buried in blogs and comments if at all.
I find MSDN equally hard to work out for other technologies as well, but at least there are other resources out there, with silverlight sometimes the only mention of a feature existing is on a developer blog.
But before we laud them for moving away from yet another high-profile flop, why didn't it gain traction? Why was it wrong for the market? Because it failed to learn the lessons of the past. It is yet another not-invented-here, one-stack-to-rule-them-all product from Microsoft. It needed developer mindshare and it was going against an entrenched competitor in Flash.
Why was it even begun, amounting to a massive waste of developer time, money, and opportunity cost? That's the real problem at the core of Microsoft. Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, failed projects pad manager resumes on 1 Microsoft Way.