Silverlight Update Aims for Greater Adoption Through Developers

webmonkey.com

9 points·qhoxie··11 comments

Microsoft now claims about one in four computers have Silverlight installed.

If this is true, Microsoft is doing better than I expected.

(And I'm a .NET developer, not one of those politically opposed to Silverlight because it isn't free enough for their particular preference of free)

I don't believe those figures for a second. I'm usually surprised when I see SL installed on someone's system.

i have yet to view anything that makes me want to install silverlight. that's unlikely to change.

The Olympics.Streaming, high-quality, LIVE video feed. The low bandwidth quality SL content easily beat the high-bandwidth quality of Flash streams on sites like Hulu and Amazon VOD.

And that was just the beta.

"And that was just the beta."

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you think Microsoft will fund even more people to make SilverLight-exclusive content after the beta?

I'm sure they meant one in four computers at Microsoft HQ :)

It simply doesn't matter if anyone has Silverlight installed or not. If you build a killer app with it, users will install it if you tell them to. How do you think Flash got so big?

Not if they can't. What's the current best selling hardware category in computing? What OS do they use? Does Microsoft provide a stable, working Silverlight plugin?

For a long while, it was installed on OEM computers like Dell and HP, so users didn't need to install it.

It still is installed by default on most consumer-line Dell models.

Maybe microsoft installed it itself in my xp but i will never install it by myself. They bundle it with messenger, live id, explorer toolbars or who knows what.

they bundle it with the latest Office installer (including the OSX version)

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