David / All. Thats not accurate. Ubiquity stats are a developer's placebo, as in the end we noticed at trend in around this argument when it came to Silverlight. Initially when we had ~10% ubiquity world wide Flash having 98% etc it was an extremely tough battle and what got us over the line really was developers assuming that we'd push Silverlight out over the Windows Update - obviously one can't given the consent decree, but why confirm that.
To artificially boost the numbers we'd then sign OEM's etc to socket Silverlight into place and combine that with some fiddling around with the numbers (rounding out and tweaking some estimates etc here and there) you in turn arrive at a "download" rate. The reality is finding a number in around ubiquity had to be around 70% there abouts (based of information gotten from Adobe/Macromedia as they noticed around this number was the tipping point for developers accepting that the current iteration of Flash was seeded). No matter what we would do in around Silverlight in its first couple of years of birth was never going to hit 70% so we then looked at "why" 70% was the number needed. The more investigations taken place the more we learn that the developer(s) needed to be convinced that persona(s) like Soccer Mums etc world wide would have to have a version of Silverlight installed before a development team would agree to adopt the technology in a public consumer facing way. It's basically nothing to do with the soccer mum deciding whether or not they would install, it had everything to do with the psychology of the team who's about to create something for the said soccer mum to install. Enter Bejing Olympics. It not only highlighted this as a reality but it also underpinned a stark contrast in that we had around 100's of millions (forget the actual number) of downloads and we also broke records in around user viewing habits when it came to online watching (ie avg person spent 20mins+ watching vs most video sites of this number bottom out around 3-5mins). So here you have a huge success story that highlights that in reality people will install a freakin virus if it means getting to content they want - yet - it still wasn't enough to become a tipping point for development teams to fully embrace Silverlight in a consumer focused fashion (that and the tooling story etc is still somewhat crappy) In short, what really is your success story here around any web facing solution is your exit numbers or abandonment rates combined with how you solicit a user to persist in the experience. If all you do is put in place a "Get Silverlight" badge and then cry foul when you find out 80% of your unique visitors said "bugger that, bye" then well it was not really Silverlight's problem it was more along the lines of "why should i get silverlight?" The downside is you have to also sell the end user on why they should get Silverlight to experience your site but also why Silverlight is a long term investment in their download prospects... HTML5 is not going to change this equation, if anything it probably will get a bit more chaotic and lethargic over time given all browsers cant just "support HTML5 spec as-is and then leave it at that" - they all still need to differentiate and thus one can expect forking of the "purity and innocence" of what a browser does today to what it will do tomorrow...so if anything all thats happening is we're shifting the plugin deeper inside the browser and hiding behind the developer ubiquity cloak of stupidity :) Chasing the "one-technology platform to rule them all" belief is really what phscyology calls a "confirmation bias" *Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true* Read: http://www.riagenic.com/archives/36 - What does a potential Silverlight Adoption Lifecycle look like? --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:32 PM, David Connors <da...@codify.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:31 PM, James Chapman-Smith < > ja...@chapman-smith.com> wrote: > >> If I'm going to develop a new "web-based" application in HTML or >> Silverlight, what would the comparative effort be like? And really, what >> kind of pros & cons are worth evaluating? >> >> >> >> By HTML I am thinking ASP.NET MVC, but it could be something else >> ".NET"-ish. >> >> > What is the target audience? If it is something that you're targeting at a > mass market, using SL is suicide IMO. > > http://www.statowl.com/silverlight.php > > <http://www.statowl.com/silverlight.php>40% of users either > don't/can't/won't have SL installed. Wave goodbye to their money. > > -- > *David Connors* | da...@codify.com | www.codify.com > Software Engineer > Codify Pty Ltd > Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 > 189 363 > V-Card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors > Address Info: https://www.codify.com/contact > >
