Microsoft's Director of Developer Platform Marketing, Brian Goldfarb, and Adobe's Director of Technology Strategy, Anup Murarka, recently participated in an interview together about their competing rich web formats and what the future holds. Currently, Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash both are well entrenched, with a legion of developers sitting on each side of the fence. However, Microsoft and Adobe are both warily eyeing HTML5, an open standard that could unravel support for their proprietary platforms.
In terms of PC user base, Microsoft's latest figures show it to have 45 percent market penetration for Silverlight worldwide and 60 percent in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile Adobe, benefiting from 10-plus years on the market, is in 98 percent of computers worldwide. Reportedly, it was able to bump 95 percent of users worldwide to Flash 10 within a year of its release.
Adobe has a large developer base, but it isn't releasing exact figures. Microsoft openly claims a developer base of 500,000 developers. Its recent high profile content victories have included using Silverlight for coverage of the Winter Olympics, the upcoming March Madness (college basketball's annual championship tournament), Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and the Netflix Watch Instantly service. Adobe, meanwhile, continues to control the rich content backend for some of the web's biggest sites like YouTube and Hulu.
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