Silverlight Penetration

Silverlight 2 RTM'd yesterday with a personal hero of mine, Scott Guthrie, doing the press release thang. 

We've been taking very small steps in the Silverlight direction for a month or so now (the fancy bits on Tourism sites are currently all Flash-based) but have yet to commit due to take-up rates of the Silverlight player--it's still early days on that front, despite decent penetration rates given the player's only been around for a year or so. The official press release claims Silverlight is installed on one out of every four desktops but the install base is as high as 50% in some countries. The Beijing olympics and a number of other high-profile partner sites are cited as major penetration drivers.

Flash has been around a lot longer and obviously has a greater penetration rate so I thought it would be useful to compare the number of global visitors to all of the Tourism WA eMarketplace sites running Silverlight versus the number running Flash. The results were pulled from Omniture and are as follows:

• 15% of visitors to the eMarketplace sites have Silverlight installed
  
• An average of 17.6% of internet users have Silverlight installed (so not quite one out four just yet)
  
• 101.6% of visitors to the eMarketplace sites have Flash installed (yes, 101.6%...)
• An average of 87.5% of internet users have Flash installed

I'll keep an eye on these stats and report back in another six months. 

Guthrie's a superstar and in typical Scott Gu fashion--despite being and MS VP, he's got a dandy blog post to get you started with Silverlight:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

I'm planning to do some MOSS/Silverlight posts in the coming months to detail my experience integrating Silverlight with SharePoint and may even have a Silverlight web part available for download before long! Watch this space...

[Update: no cool Silverlight dev to report unfortunately :-( but I have posted current penetration stats along with some links to related posts of mine.]