Adobe Flash vs. Microsoft Silverlight 2008
I was browsing and I came across a website that required me to download Silverlight. I have Silverlight running on my primary machines already but I didn’t even realize until today I didn’t have it installed on my backup laptop. This got me thinking, how popular is Silverlight? I have heard about it more and more, although, I haven’t tried to develop anything using it yet.
I decided to do a little research. It turns out that Adobe Flash is installed on about 98% of computers while Microsoft Silverlight is only installed on about 25% of computers. I checked some of Microsoft’s websites to see where they were using Silverlight and where they were using Flash. I checked msn.com and microsoft.com and both featured Flash presentations, video, and advertisements. It seems to me with the amount of traffic msn.com gets converting to Silverlight and forcing loyal users to download Silverlight would help with market penetration, although, it may discourage users.
My research also showed Microsoft has made some major gains in market penetration through some big name deals. For example Silverlight was the technology that was used to display video from the Beijing Olympics in August. Microsoft has also been working on major corporate sponsorships. For example, Netflix Inc. recently said it would use Silverlight to stream movies over the Internet. Also, Microsoft donated development time and resources to help CBS College Sports revamp their websites using Silverlight earlier this year.
It is too bad for Microsoft they’re not better friends with Google. If they could get YouTube to switch formats to Silverlight their problems would be solved in about 24 hours. I must admit, Silverlight is doing better than I expected. I expected it to be the FrontPage of rich internet applications when it was first announced. From what I have read it sounds like a powerful platform and with the large amount of money Microsoft is willing to throw at it, it is likely to become a serious contender to Flash, although, it will take some more major adoptions before it has the market penetration to make it practical to use on regular websites. I am going to have to keep an eye on Microsoft to see when they switch to their own platform!
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This site has a lot of good information on plugin market penetration:
<a href=”http://www.statowl.com.
Here are the SilverLight and Flash pages:
Silverlight
Flash