In my job, I am fortunate to meet with many different people from all different types of companies. I always seem to get the question on Silverlight market adoption and people want to know how we are getting Silverlight deployed.
When the question of Silverlight adoption comes up I typically discuss all the ways we are deploying Silverlight and what the strategy is. In a nutshell, we have continued to focus on our internal properties like MSN and Microsoft.com and work closely with external partners to help drive adoption. We have great partner sites like NBC/Olympics 2008, CBS/ETOnline, NBA.com, MLB, Home Shopping Network, Mini-Clip, and others that are building rich applications that support the adoption of Silverlight. While we have not announced penetration numbers to date, we have announced and are proud that we are doing somewhere north of 1.5M installs a day. We are seeing this number rise very rapidly and this weekend we have begun rolling out more applications on Microsoft.com that take advantage of Silverlight. Due to the vast number of Silverlight applications coming online on Microsoft.com we have started prompting users to install Silverlight when they come to the Microsoft.com homepage.
Whats the impact? Microsoft has one of the top web properties on the Internet (Media Metrix had it at around 60M uu/per month) and we will be rolling out more applications that use Silverlight over time. We already have sections of Microsoft.com like our downloads section that utilize Silverlight, as well as have our video preview site that's coming on line as well. Not to mention Silverlight is already part of Microsoft Update. It's important to note, we can’t just flip a switch and switch these sites to using Silverlight. These sites like Microsoft.com, MSN.com, all have intentions to move to Silverlight to enhance their user experiences, but just like other business' we talk to, have existing development schedules and business plans that need to incorporate the technologies.
A wise man on our marketing team once said, "it's not a matter of "if" Silverlight will be adopted, it's "when", and we are seeing the "when" come faster than we expected." We are proud to start seeing it on Microsoft.com and look forward to more applications coming online and continued growth with our partners.
Thanks for all the support!
C
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Silverlight Cream for July 05, 2009 -- #629
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2 comments:
Good to see you doing this blog, Chris -- and also glad to see you landed on the Silverlight team. After all the ups and downs of Netshow/Windows Media over the years, it finally feels like you guys are doing it completely right this time.
The cross-platform compatibility is huge, and it's the part you guys have always missed out on. Hopefully that's water under the bridge and soon to be a historical oddity.
Looking forward to tearing into my copies of Expression Studio and digging around. I've had a couple of ideas kicking around for a while that Silverlight might finally allow.
All-in-all, it's been a nice shot in the arm.
Thanks Tom. Nice to see you again. Yes, Silverlight is really more a development platform than just a media player like the old days. We have spent an enormous amount of time building the right tools with Expression Studio and Visual Studio to tightly integrate the design / development workflow which is a key differentiator.
It's also not a media player trying to be a development platform which we had with Windows Media ( .ocx). Glad to see you found me and look forward to any feedback you (and others have) while using the product.
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