Earlier this month (January 2009) I made the prediction that Silverlight penetration would approach Flash penetration (80%+).  It's a bold prediction, especially since it is widely held that as of this month, penetration is in the 25% range.

There was a string of very large scale successes just this month, notably around Obama's inauguration.  These included the Presidential Inaugural Committee choosing Silverlight to broadcast video of the inauguration and CNN creating an unbelievable 3D collage of the inauguration moment using Photosynth & Silverlight.  And that was just January.

Despite my enthusiasm, not everyone is convinced that Silverlight is on it's way up.  This article in Infoworld -- Silverlight adoption hampered by economic crisis -- chief among them.  On one hand, the hypothesis is likely to be bang on, in the sense that nearly everything is likely to be hampered by the economic crisis.  It's sort of stating the obvious. 

But some of the statements in the article are just so opposite to my experiences:

"The UI is considered the last part of the application," said Ryan Peterson, principal and software engineer for Serenity Software, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, company that specializes in UI consulting and design. "The mindset has always been and still is: You build the application and then you build the interface. It's a large contributing factor to why people cut that [first]. They think if the application works, we can take care of the interface later."

What?  Maybe the mindset is completely different between Pennsylvania and Toronto, but the above statement doesn't resonate with me or any of my customers.  And while it's true that we do a lot of work in large-scale web properties where User Experience is paramount, we also do a ton of work in the nitty gritty of internal business applications, and User Experience and Interface Design is nearly always at the forefront.

I remain very bullish on the overall growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in 2009 and I think that Silverlight (and Flash for that matter) have a long rosy future ahead of them.  I'm really looking forward to Mix09 in Las Vegas, where a portion of the web community will come together for the 4th year and discuss, with enthusiasm!, the future of the web.