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Flash/Silverlight: How much business can you afford to turn away?

This content is 12 years old and may not reflect reality today nor the author’s current opinion. Please keep its age in mind as you read it.

Tim Anderson was asking about the future of Silverlight on Twitter today so here are my thoughts on the subject, in the context of earlier posts on the future of Flash:2009: Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
2010: Face it Flash, your days are numbered.
2011: RIP Adobe Flash (1996-2011) – now let’s bury the dead

In the early days of the Internet, a lack of native browser support for “advanced” functionality (particularly video) created a vacuum that propelled Flash to near ubiquity. It was the only plugin to achieve such deep penetration, though I would argue never as high as 99% (which Adobe laughably advertise to this day). As a result, developers were able to convince clients to adopt the platform for all manner of interactive sites (including, infamously, many/most restaurants).

The impossible challenge for proprietary browser plugins is staying up-to-date and secure across a myriad hardware and software platforms — it was hard enough trying to support multiple browsers on multiple versions of Windows on one hardware platform (x86), but with operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X now commanding non-negligible shares of the market it’s virtually impossible. Enter mobile devices, which by Adobe’s own reckoning outnumber PCs by 3 to 1. Plugin vendors now have an extremely diverse ecosystem of hardware (AMD, Intel, etc.) and software (Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, etc.) and an impossibly large number of permutations to support. Meanwhile browser engines (e.g. WebKit, which is the basis for Safari and Chrome on the desktop and iOS, Android and webOS on mobile devices) have added native support for the advanced features whose absence created a demand for Flash.

Unsurprisingly, not only is Flash in rapid decline — as evidenced by Adobe recently pulling out of the mobile market (and thus 3 in 4 devices) — but it would be virtually impossible for any competitor to reach its level of penetration. As such, Silverlight had (from the outset) a snowflake’s chance in hell of achieving an “acceptable” level of penetration.

What’s an “acceptable level of penetration” you ask? That’s quite simple — it’s the ratio of customers that businesses are prepared to turn away in order to access “advanced” functionality that is now natively supported in most browsers. At Adobe’s claimed 99% penetration you’re turning away 1 in 100 customers. At 90% you’re turning away 1 in 10. According to http://riastats.com, if you’re deploying a Flash site down under then you’re going to be turning away 13%, or a bit more than 1 in 8. For Silverlight it’s even worse — almost half of your customers won’t even get to see your site without having to install a plugin (which they are increasingly less likely to do).

How much revenue can your business tolerate losing? 1%? 10%? 50%? And for what benefit?