by Ryan Stewart
October 14th, 2008 @ 12:01 am

(Update: It also looks like you can grab the final bits as of 12:01 this morning: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0) After listening to the Q&A from the press conference today, digging into some of the details, and reading some of the commentary on various blogs, there are a few things that I don’t quite understand about the announcement today.

I think part of this is because there wasn’t a whole lot of new news from the announcement and it was more of a direction announcement than anything. Of course, I work for Adobe, so I look at the world differently. The end result is that it’s great Silverlight 2 is finally out in the wild. As an RIA enthusiast and an Adobe employee I’ve witnessed that Adobe does its most innovative work when both our community and our competitors push us.

But there are a few things that struck me as odd from the release. The 1 in 4 Number - Scott Guthrie said that “already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed” but I’m not quite sure what that number means. Ben Romano from the Seattle Times noticed it too and it seems like an odd metric to use. The numbers game is a little bit bogus everywhere because there are so many ways to measure things: downloads, penetration, etc.

The other numbers show that Silverlight is gaining traction, but it’s hard for developers to do a direct penetration comparison with Flash right now. Linux - In the Q&A, Tim Anderson asked about Linux support. Right now Silverlight has partial support for 1.0 (though it doesn’t include video or MP3 playback, two of the main features of Silverlight 1.0) and there is no support for 2 on Linux right now.