Last week Silverlight 3.0 was released. In Toronto, ObjectSharp put
on a very cool launch event, with lots of great demos and compelling reasons to start
using Silverlight immediately. I was impressed, but I’m a Microsoft fan-boy
(fan-boi?), so that doesn’t count. It was certainly fitting that ObjectSharp
propose using Silverlight for some parts of our new website www.woodbineentertainment.com,
seeing as they won the bid to build the new site. I saw the potential; as did
a few others on the team. However, some executives did not see the benefit.
I respect their opinion, somewhat because I have to – they can fire me after all,
and mostly because they have business sense on their side.
The company is very much on the cutting edge of technology in a few respects, but
very conservative in the way we choose technology. For instance, our new site
will be built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I’d wager there are
less than a hundred publically facing websites on the internet that use MOSS (probably
due to complexity and cost), yet we chose to use it because of the potential in further
developing it in future iterations.
Silverlight on the other hand is a different story. Recent reports peg Silverlight
penetration at around 25-30% of all browsers. Whether or not this is accurate,
who knows. It’s the only data available. Flash penetration is at 96%.
Now, in my opinion 25% growth in 2 years on Silverlight’s part is impressive.
Flash has been around for nearly 2 decades. There is definitely a correlation
to be made in there somewhere.
At this point, I was sold on using Silverlight. The exec’s still weren’t.
Seeing as Silverlight is a browser plug-in, it must be installed in some way, shape,
or form. At 25%, that means our customer demographic would have around 10% penetration.
That is terrible. Getting them to install a plug-in to view site content is
a tough sell. The executives didn’t want to scare away customers by making them
install the plug-in. SharePoint doesn’t need a browser plug-in.
And here in lies the Catch-22
To expand our marketed audience, we build on Silverlight to give them more content
that is better authored to their needs. In doing so, we lose customers because
they need to install the plug-in. There is no metric at this point in time to
help us extrapolate the difference. There is a reasonable risk involved with
using such cutting-edge technology. We will use it when browser penetration
is high enough, yet browser penetration won’t grow if sites like ours don’t use Silverlight.
Ah Well
I’m a technology risk taker. I live on the bleeding edge. I run Exchange
2010 beta, on Server 2008 virtualized on Hyper-V, with IIS7 running this site, browsed
by IE8 on Windows 7 RC, and authored in Office 2007 (2010 if Microsoft would give
me the flippin bits!). The company, not so much. Risk is good – as long
as you can mitigate it properly. I can manage my risk, as it’s not the end of
the world is something here crashes. I don’t lose an audience. If the
company can’t market to it’s customers because the tools in use are too new, it will
lose audience. Period. And that means lost revenue.
Maybe we can convince the exec’s in Phase II.
