Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers

ericatcw writes "At its Mix08 Web development conference, Microsoft said that its Silverlight rich Internet application platform is downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times every day; Microsoft has a goal of 200 million installs by midyear. But Silverlight is at the beginning of a long slog towards gaining traction. Computerworld did a quick analysis of job listings at nine popular career sites and found that an average of 41 times more ads mentioned Adobe's Flash than mentioned Silverlight. As expected only 6 months after Silverlight's introduction, the number of programming books carried on Amazon.com was also heavily skewed in favor of Flash."

Comments

if these downloaders are anything like me

[rucs_hack]

Like me, many of these 1.5 million are people who where breifly confused into thinking they needed silverlight in order to access the microsoft site. I took advantage of their dreamspark initiative, and encountered a 'you need to install silverlight' message. Turns out this was for a small silverlight animation, nothing to do with the main content.

Since then I've not been back. Nor would I intentionally seek to develop for that platform. Why bother? There's javascript and flash already.

Cross-platform, or not?

[dalleboy]

I'm still a bit concerned about the supposed cross-platform-ness. Is the Javascript file Silverlight.js still used to initialize the Silverlight object in Silverlight 2? If that is the case it will never be truly cross-platform.

If you aren't running one of the platforms supported by Microsoft (Windows (IE, Firefox) and Mac OS X (Firefox, Safari)) you will get redirected to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92800 (or similar), regardless if you have a Silverlight compatible plugin installed. Using the Silverlight.js file is the defacto standard way of initializing Silverlight, at least in previous releases.

It will be the responsibility to each web-developer to update their copy of Silverlight.js in order to get Silverlight to run on other platforms than the ones directly supported by Microsoft. This will never happen, except perhaps for a small portion that are Moonlight enthusiasts.

Millions?

[The Aethereal]

Of those millions, how many are like me and have downloaded and installed Silverlight, but can not make it work? When I browse to a Silverlight page, it just says that I need to install Silverlight. So I uninstall it, redownload, and reinstall. Nothing changed. I believe this is in IE and Firefox.

Re:1.5 million times every day ?

[apdyck]

The answer to this question is simple. I did a fresh install of Windows XP last night (for a client), and my third round of Windows Updates (after the Windows Installer and the bulk of the updates, including IE7), one of the updates was for Silverlight. To be fair, it was considered an optional update, but the average computer user sees update and thinks "I need that for increased security" or some such. Long and short, it's on Windows Update, and that's why they're getting so many downloads.

Re:Why switch?

[hummassa]

I will agree as soon as someone finds a way to build both a Flash and Silverlight application from the same source code, makes almost all websites provide both and the users can choose with a browser setting which one to use. Then the issue is at least close to comparable to Linux distros... Plug OpenLaszlo...