email: ceberhardt@scottlogic.co.uk
The announced launch of Silverlight 5 has got the developer community all excited about improved media capabilities, MVVM support, printing and 3D, but how will Silverlight adoption evolve throughout 2011. In this blog post I look at historic data and use this to predict a 76% adoption of Silverlight 5 by the end of 2011.
The Silverlight Firestarter event last week (December 2nd 2010) saw Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie use his keynote speech to announce the launch of Silverlight 5 which will emerge at some point in the first half of 2011. The new features, which my colleague Gergely details in a recent blog post, are geared towards media and business applications, which in my opinion is a good thing. This further re-enforces Silverlight’s positions as a plugin for application development, making it easier to differentiate it from HTML5.
New versions of Silverlight are being released at quite a high rate (approximately 1.5 VIPAs), however I feel that feature completeness isn’t really an obstacle that prevents people from using Silverlight, as a technology, it feels quite mature already. I think the main obstacle that prevents people from choosing Silverlight is the adoption statistics, i.e. the proportion of people who have the Silverlight plugin installed. With the announced release of Silverlight 5, I thought I would look at the current Silverlight adoption and make some predictions for the future.
There are a couple of prominent sites that collect plugin adoption staticstics, riastats and StatOwl. Currently they give adoptions statistics for Silverlight of 67% and 58% respectively, with the difference between these values most probably being due to the demographic of the sites which they collect statistics from. StatOwl provides pretty detailed historic statistics, using this data the chart below shows the adoption of various Silverlight versions over the past couple of years:
I would expect the total adoption to follow a sigmoid, as per the diffusion of innovations theory, and you can just about see that the adoption is starting to decelerate. To make future predictions I have fitted a logistic function to the total adoption. What I find quite interesting is the adoption curves for each new Silverlight version, which are the components of the total adoption. Each starts with a rapid sigmoid conversion, followed by an exponential ‘tail’. Fitting a curve to the total adoption, then normalizing reveals this shape more clearly:
If I take a guess at the Silverlight 5 launch date, based on Scott’s announcement that it will be in the first half of 2011, I can extrapolate the above chart to give the adoption curve for Silverlight 5:
The shaded area in the above chart is the extrapolated future adoption. De-normalizing the above gives the following total adoption predictions:
The above chart predicts that Silverlight 5 will have a 76% adoption by the end of 2011, and that the total Silverlight adoption will be 81%.
I will be interesting to see how good these predictions are!
Regards, Colin E.
[...] my previous blog post I assumed that Silverlight adoption would follow a sigmoid curve as per the Diffusion of Innovation [...]
[...] but, being plugin-based it suffers from the same issues that Flash Player does, plus according to ScottLogic’s Silverlight Adoption statistics, it’s nowhere near Flash’s adoption [...]
[...] camps. On the Silverlight side, adoption among the public is a bit lower than anticipated. 60-75% are the estimates I’ve seen so far. On the business side, lack of Silverlight support on the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry have [...]
Pretty good forecasts – just read that SL adoption has reached 70% exactly as you’ve forecasted for April 2011
Yes … I have l33t line fitting skills
Thanks Gergely.
What about Silverlight today ?It is a important thing for Silverlight Developer. 70%?80% ?
[...] Silverlight の普及率予想 [...]
What’s going to be new, though, in 2011 is the rapid adoption of the iPad and Android tablets neither of which run Silverlight. So, it’s possible that Android tablet owners will use their tablets to view videos and thus stop using Silverlight on their PCs. In addition, browsers running HTML 5 are becoming more widespread which may also reduce Silverlight usage. It’ll be interesting to see in 2nd quarter 2012 what the actual Silverlight adoption is. What will be more interesting though is seeing how many websites in 2012 actually use Silverlight. It’s my feeling that right now the number is very low. With HTML 5 becoming more common, I fear the number will stay the same.
Hi Neil,
I agree, HTML5 is on the rise, and the mobile / tablet market is where HTML5 has some unique advantages over Flash and Silverlight. However, I do not think the competition will result in a single winner. HTML5 is great for interactive web sites, but where Flash/Flex and Silverlight really come into their own is the development of complex, interactive applications, in this area developing in HTML5 is struggle. See my recent article on HTML5 vs. Silverlight:
http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/colin/2010/11/does-html5-mean-the-end-is-in-sight-for-silverlight/
Regards, Colin E.
SL5 was announced to be available at the end of 2011, not the first half. A beta for developers is to be available in the first half only.
Good point – my mistake. This should not effect the overall adoption statistic of 81%, but may result in a lower adoption for SL5 at the end of 2011. In 12 months time I plan to compare my predictions with the real data – fingers crossed!
Big events like the Olympics, Movie Awards shows, Pro and College Sports (Sunday Night Football, NCAA Basketball Tournament) and streaming movies drive new installations. Popular devices with Silverlight built-in (WP7) will also increase overall adoption percentage.
Yes, you are right, all of these things will drive adoption. There have also been similar events in the past, the net effect should give us something which approximates to a sigmoid curve.
Regards, Colin E.
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