Silverlight Is Gaining Momentum

One of the draws of WP7 is that apps can be written in Silverlight, and as they’ve said, any Silverlight developer is a WP7 developer. So, the strength of WP7 is linked to the strength of Silverlight, at least to a degree. Anyway, as of a April Silverlight had a 60% worldwide penetration rate. Not bad, but MS still used Flash for it’s Kin site, so they must have feared it wasn’t adapted broadly enough. Well fast forward a little and MS is changing it using the power of monopoly persuasion. From Justin Angel we learn that MS pushed Silverlight 4 as an ‘important’ update on Windows Update. And MS confirmed that on June 3 the update was pushed and anyone with Silverlight would have been prompted to upgrade and anyone without it would have been prompted to install it. As we know, most general users just click ‘yes’ to anything that pops up. The result? Expect a near term jump in the number of PCs with Silverlight installed…thus more attraction of Silverlight devs and more WP7 devs. And any Silverlight web app can easily be ported to WP7 with most people saying it’s a half a day’s work. See MS, you’re finally getting off the sidelines and using your combined power for a specific purpose – I like.