Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart:
What’s keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would take a look – see the chart below. Since Silverlight and the somewhat related Expression Web books started appearing in October, we don’t see much trendworthy activity. We do see Flash selling 6-7 times the units as Expression Web, Flash experiencing a holiday bump and Flex increasing steadily. Silverlight and Expression Web are young and Microsoft famously sticks by its products – should be an interesting topic to follow.
In short, if book sales are any indicator, traction for Silverlight appears to be quite low.
While Roger is correct in noting that it’s never wise to count Microsoft out, so far it does appear that they haven’t made much of a dent in Flash’s dominance.
SearchEngineWatch recently reported that even Microsoft is still not using Silverlight on many of its web properties.