Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP Developer Division at Microsoft, spoke at Remix in Brighton about Silverlight deployment. He says there are around 1.5 million installations per day, and that version 1.0 will auto-update to version 2.0 when it is released, which he says is “shortly”.
Wide deployment is critical for Silverlight, though a limitation of version 2.0 (the one with the .NET runtime included) is that it does not work on PowerPC Macs.
Guthrie also mentioned Internet Explorer 8, which he says will ship “towards the end of the year”.
I was always under the impression that Silverlight 2.0 was supposed to be out before the Olympics. It makes me wonder what the delay is? Do you think it’s a technical issue or could it have to do with getting the rights from Apple on the DRM? I wasn’t exactly impressed with 1.0, but am still looking to see if the quality is sharper once they make the update.