Silverlight 3 has been announced at MIX09 for late summer this year. According to Microsoft the Silverlight browser plugin is installed on 300 millions machines, Adobe Flash on 950 million machines. So Silverlight catches up here very fast.
Silverlight adoption has the potential to happen very fast because of the following reasons:
- There is a continuous trend towards rich Internet applications. Of course good developers can create great web applications with HTML, DHTML, Ajax, JQuery and other technologies. But with Silverlight every average developer is able to do the same in less time. This brings products faster to the market and gives you an advantage over your competitors.
- Silverlight opens rich Internet web development to all of the 4+ million .NET developers worldwide without learning new technologies and programming languages.
- Another big advantage with the upcoming Silverlight version is that applications can run out of the browser as regular (cross platform) desktop applications without no code changes.
- You can also reuse most of the code to build regular .NET WPF desktop application, or vice versa. It is pretty easy to port WPF desktop applications to Silverlight, because Silverlight is using a WPF subset for the GUI.
For existing c# or vb .NET developers Silverlight is very attractive because existing skills can be reused with the same base class library without laerning new technolgies. When do you start Silverlight hacking?
I offer a fifth reason that “adoption” has been so rapid. Silverlight is distributed via Windows Update. Anyone who has Windows Update set to automatically keep Windows up-to-date will have Silverlight installed automatically.
Also, I think the term “adoption” is a bit inaccurate. It’s not as if there are 300 million people regularly using SIlverlight but rather Silverlight has an installed client base of 300 million. To be clear, I’m not saying that Silverlight is bad or that Flash is better; I’m simply saying that I think that Microsoft’s numbers are misleading (see: “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff).
If I had my way, I’d much rather see an open standard instead of either Flash or Silverlight. I wish we had seen something like SVG+SMIL+JS take over.
> If I had my way, I’d much rather see an open standard
> instead of either Flash or Silverlight. I wish
> we had seen something like SVG+SMIL+JS take over.
yes, I agree with you. A open standard which could replace Silverlight and Flash would be nice, but I don’t see this to happen soon.