Hi, Anyone knows the penetration rate (in %) for all North-American internet users with the Silverlight plugin installed? Been looking all around, but couldn't find any comprehensive numbers.
I'm looking for General Public penetration rates, not only within the dev community. Something close to Adobe's flash version penetration stats would be great.
Microsoft reckons over 100 million Silverlight plugin downloads, but I'm not sure how that translates into percentages. Still definitely lower than Flash. Have a look at this blog for some more in-depth info.
Dont forget that MS can push Silverlight out over Windows Update to immediately reach millions of PCs. (That doesnt help Mac users though) Pushing it via Windows Update will also reach all the "Joe the Plumber" users who may not be comfortable installing plugins themselves
The real challenge for them is to get a decent base of Silverlight apps that people will want to get the plugin for. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there.
I see Silverlight probably having more success as a platform for intranet web apps in large companies (I'm building one at the moment).
The best I can find are:
and:
http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php
Both have Silverlight at around 20%.
Update one year later: Both sites now show Silverlight penetration around 55%
On the December 12, 2008 podcast of DotNetRocks, Richard and Carl interviewed Tim Heuer who is a product manager on the Silverlight team at microsoft. What surprised me is that Tim said,
Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, I think that's probably an accurate number. I think a lot of the PR term I keep hearing is every one in four people in the world have access to a machine with Silverlight.
Source: http://perseus.franklins.net/dotnetrocks_0404_tim_heuer.pdf (page 14)
One in four have access to a machine with Silverlight, that's not exactly the same as one in four machines have Silverlight. I'd assume the adoption base has gone up since December, but that quote tells me that at that point and time, the adoption rate was below 25%. If so, that would lend support to what webdtc found with a Silverlight adoption of 20%.
Adoption seems to grow about 2 percent per month, so if this continues you could expect about 40 percent by the end of the year. Hopefully the fact that the NCAA tournament is using Silverlight and then the release of Silverlight 3 hopefully sometime later this year will accelerate that rate.
I believe penetration percentage is absolutely useless against actual stats of your user base.
We have lot of mac users and still 25% of them are PowerPC, and silverlight doesnt come for PowerPC, now we can not tell our customers to go ahead and buy $1000 to $1500 new intel mac, they will say good bye to us because they have other vendors.
Silverlight is good, but honestly its only for windows users, if its available you can tell your users to download it and install it. But I think we need to wait 2-3 years, by the time, silverlight can be available and stable for bigger user base.
Check this recent article:
http://fragiledevelopment.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/silverlight-market-penetration-2/