I don’t believe the comparison between Flash/Flex and Silverlight is so simple.

While the browser installation rate is critically important for many applications it is not always so important in organizations that control the desktop AND are primarily .Net shops. Similarly, some organizations will always be less risk averse if there is something else driving them to use Silverlight.

On technology and development tools there are still things you can do with Flash 10 that you cannot do with Silverlight 3 including sophisticated text flow, peer-to-peer data, audio, and video transfer, and local audio and video capture. On the other hand Silverlight’s raw code execution performance is clearly better. So things aren’t really so simple. Tools for developing entire projects – including things like Flash, Flex framework, Flash Catalyst, Flash Building, CS4 and so on – again its not so simple.

Of course both Adobe and Microsoft continue to improve their products so that what seems true today is certain to change next year and the year after.

Flex benefits: Almost all browsers have flash installed.

Silverlight benefits: Vastly superior technology and development tools.

Then how come TVs could ever beat Radios some decades ago given that Radios had 100% of penetration rate back then while TVs started out from 0% and cost lot more?

A better question might be to ask why DAB Radio has been such a miserable failure compared to analogue radio, given its manifest improvements in quality and technical advantages?

Then how come TVs could ever beat Radios some decades ago given that Radios had 100% of penetration rate back then while TVs started out from 0% and cost lot more? If you only count on penetration rate to fend off SilverLight, good luck. I don’t think every browser comes with a PDF plugin in it yet it hasn’t stop people from installing one and reading the PDF files online, has it?

John

For most customers evaluating Flex and Silverlight side-by-side, all of Silverlight’s strong points don’t matter because 98% of their customers have Flash and 5-15% at most will have Silverlight. Even Flex/Flash’s numerous crippling flaws and design mistakes can’t outweigh the fact that everyone has it installed.

As mentioned in the post, ultimately the only way for MS to overcome this is to get Silverlight installed on more machines and incentivize people to use it to create more content.

Offering a competitive feature set is a start, but I suspect they may need to go further and start distributing the plugin via Windows Update. No doubt that would draw antitrust complaints from numerous tinfoil hat wearers, but it’s probably the only way for them to start gaining market share rapidly enough to present a threat to Flash.

Honestly, even if doing that required that they also deploy updated versions of Flash Player for ‘fairness’ it would probably still be a worthwhile business decision in order to establish a level playing field.

Adobe’s recent track record with Flash and Acrobat clearly demonstrates that they could take a nap for 5 years like Microsoft did with IE, or even actively sabotage the quality of their own product and still hold on to the majority of their marketshare due to inertia.