Scott Guthrie on Silverlight vs. Flash

DevConnections magazine: What inroads has Silverlight made competitively against Flash?

Scott Guthrie: We’ve always looked at big customers and exciting solutions that have gone live. Most those customers I’ve mentioned have used Flash before; now they’ve adopted Silverlight. They’ve not only been successful commercially or financially, but whether you look at Twitter traffic or blog traffic for anecdotal feedback people are blown away by Monday Night Football. They’re continually impressed with Netflix. There’s a WOW factor with all these solutions. I know we say that something is more productive or cheaper or more TCO, but the nice thing about Silverlight is that people see the user experience and just go “WOW. That is really cool video.” Those are some of the big inroads we’ve made with Silverlight. We have a lot of great mindshare. And we’re also seeing our usage continually increase, both in terms of customers and the percentage of machines that already have Silverlight installed.

DevConnections magazine: Has Microsoft been gaining market share against Flash?

Scott Guthrie: Every week that goes by, we continue to see our market share increase. We haven’t published any recent numbers, but we do track it every week and we go up a little bit. I’d say we’re making good progress. And we’re pretty much on track with where we wanted to be.

DevConnections magazine: I’ve heard Silverlight described as .NET light. Is it destined to replace the framework?

Scott Guthrie: No it will definitely not replace the framework. The thing with Silverlight is that we ship a version of the .NET Framework that’s a subset of the full .NET Framework. It’s basically the subset that makes sense for doing web-based client development. A big emphasis point has been: How do we enable that to work well and how do we ensure that .NET developers whether they’re running on the server or on the desktop or the browser with Silverlight can basically use the same language, the same tools, the same API, and run everywhere. So I don’t view it as replacing anything. I think of it more as just a way that we can make sure that we share our technology and share our code and use it everywhere.