Demand for Microsoft Silverlight remains sluggish

commentary

Microsoft has been making a big push to own the web with Silverlight, but six months into the experiment, few are signing up to help with the coup d'etat. Sure, Microsoft is seeing plenty of downloads (1.5 million per day, in fact, though this may have to do more with Microsoft games than real demand)Computerworld scanned the job boards and printed book titles to gauge Silverlight demand and found it a distant also-ran to Adobe's Flash:

[T]he ratio of jobs mentioning Flash or Silverlight heavily favored the former. Ratios ranged from a high of 67:1 in favor of Flash at Careerbuilder.com to a still weighty 24:1 at Dice.com. All told, averaging ratios from the nine sites found programming jobs requiring Flash skills to be 41 times more plentiful than ones asking for Silverlight.

Silverlight is new and so it's to be expected that it will take time to find publishers and employers who need in-house expertise. Even so, if developers were actively interested in it they would be searching for more information on it. They're not, as this Google Trends report shows:

No love for little Silverlight, which is a Very Good Thing. Who wants the future of the web joined to Microsoft's hip? Not I, for reasons similar to these noted by a Slashdot commentator:

Don't kid yourself - the reasoning behind Silverlight has nothing to do with Microsoft striving to make the Web a better place. It's all about gaining more control of a medium they never had much to say with (apart from the dominance of the IE, which is now being chewed at by Mozilla/Firefox).

Amen. Microsoft has been a poor steward of desktop innovation. I'd hate to see what it would do to the web.

[Renegade Knight]

Using the Windows Upate to push an unrelated product creates a false level of interest in the products. It won't make my Vista more secure, stable, faster, more robust, or even help it work. This is the kind of behavior that got MS into trouble as a monopoly. It just happens to be exactly what any smart business would do if they could.

Still I have no use for Silverlight at this point in time and am glad that I can at least ignore it as an update.

[DaGunster]

Flash vs Silverlight - or Flex vs Silverlight?
Rich Internet Applications will be a difference maker - particularly in intranets and vertical market applications. Double-check the advantage to Flash when RIA is factored. The numbers change.
This developer when with Silverlight for RIA.

[siddiqiaasif]

"... Microsoft has been a poor steward of desktop innovation. I'd hate to see what it would do to the web"

This is an example of the poor quality of journalism/reporting that is common in the current IT community. Its undeniable that IT people are religious about the technology they use and will never look at a language/technology in an objective way (Slashdot is full of such comments). But journalists should be void of such sentiments to honor their profession.
Internet and web is probably the biggest innovation and driving power of the current era. But the web platform as a technology has hardly seen any innovation in decades and not at all designed for its demands. Most companies (including Google) are still trying to hack their solutions around HTML and javascript that were not designed to do these things. And don?t even get me started on security and privacy. So calling out Microsoft for lack of innovation is nothing but ?Microsoft Bashing? that everyone loves to do and has no intelligent thought behind it. I think we should stop bashing and think how to improve the underlying technologies and move on. Silverlight is a good attempt ? nothing great yet. Flash is great ? but if anyone has tried building applications with it knows it is not designed for it. Silverlight if matures will support .Net languages and that is a solid state of the art technology ? so I hope it picks up soon.