Microsoft has come out gunning for Adobe, after Mark Garrett, Adobe EVP and CFO claimed that the adoption of the Redmond company's Flash killer was disappointing. Tim Sneath, director of the Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism team, denied such a scenario and indicated that Adobe was simply attempting to cling on to the current market share for Flash, with Silverlight coming strong from behind and threatening its dominance. Sneath emphasized that just because Adobe depicted Silverlight's uptake as suffering did in no way make it true. At the same time, Sneath pointed an accusatory finger at Adobe, for the practices used to spread AIR.

“Adobe claim that they have 100 million downloads of AIR, and that “the vast majority are being driven by great, popular applications”, listing the likes of Adobe Media Player, Tweetdeck and Twhirl as the most popular examples,” stated Sneath. “Yet they have been actively bundling AIR with Adobe [Acrobat] Reader, one of the most downloaded applications on the Internet, and you don’t even have an option to opt out of its installation. Can it really be true that “the vast majority are being driven by great, popular applications”? By framing AIR in this way, Adobe are hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy – but the reality is rather less positive.”

While Adobe claims that Flash is installed on over 90% of the world's machines, Microsoft indicated that Silverlight, as of the launch of version 2, was also present on one in four computers worldwide. Silverlight is of course a newcomer compared to Adobe Flash, but it is rising consistently thanks to Microsoft's efforts, even though for the time being it continues to be the underdog.

“The idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case. The suggestion that “Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months” is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like “fizzling out” to me – in fact, it makes Garrett’s comments seem as if he’s living in a fantasy world,” Sneath said.

And the fact of the matter is that Silverlight is indeed a threat to Flash, as it incorporates not just a media player, but also a rich WPF-based application framework that can easily rival Flash when it comes down to RIAs. “In short, we’re delighted with the progress of Silverlight, just four months after the release of Silverlight 2. While we’re not complacent about the work ahead, it’s almost amusing to read about stagnation when we’re seeing the Silverlight ecosystem really build momentum,” Sneath said.

Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0) is available for download here.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC1) can be downloaded via this link.