Why player penetration isn't as important as you might think

Something we come across a lot when we’re talking about Rich Internet Applications is the questions regarding player penetration, i.e how many people have player X installed (Adobe’s Flash vs. Microsoft’s Silverlight), as it’s generally seen as the primary measure for how easy to “see” an application will be.

However, something we’re also seeing is that the players are currently suited to different areas, Flash being very good for the public sites (video being No 1) and Silverlight being very good for Intranet based applications where Microsoft technology is used as the back end.

So, with player penetration it’s worth considering the following:  Is the player penetration at all important when you are looking at an intranet application with a closed user audience?  Do you need to worry about the percentage of the internet that has your runtime installed if you can go round and install it on all your users machines for them anyway?

Not really.

This raises another interesting thing, which is that of internal approval.  We are now finding that for those environments where neither Flash (in a new enough version) or Silverlight are present, companies are generally more willing to take on Silverlight due to the vendor – it’s a product that comes from a company they already have a relationship with, and also one that can be pushed out via Windows Update and the like.  It’s a sys-admins dream come true.

So, at the end of the day it seems that Flash vs Silverlight is definitely a case of best tool for the job.  If you are building a public facing site of some kind, use the Flash platform.  However, if you’re in a closed environment and MS are already in place – go with Silverlight / WPF.  These choices will just make your life easier.

PS:  Incidentally, we still come across lots of businesses who haven’t broken free of IE6, a seven year old browser yet (!) due to some internal policy – this goes to show how hard it can sometimes be bringing in a third party plugin to help with RIA’s.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 12 Nov 2008