On how many products can a single company work on? If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else, just how they moved the engineers that worked on IExplorer to Silverlight. It's as simple as that.
Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that.
Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation.
On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95.
You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.
"If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else"
huh?
So all that time they were working on silverlight, there was no one working on xbox. or office. or ie. or windows vista/7/xp-patches. or sharepoint. or asp.net. or sql server. or iis. or c#. or linq. or ford sync tech. or metro. or windows phone 7.
Please...
had they wanted to get in to the photoshop realm, they would have.
Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that.
Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation.
On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95.
You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.