Adobe claims 100 million AIR installs...Where's Silverlight?

Yesterday at a conference in Japan, Adobe announced it has received an independent assessment of the worldwide installed base for its Web platforms. A Millward Brown survey estimates that Flash has been installed on 99% of the world's Internet-enabled PCs, leading Adobe to estimate that Flash Player 10 by itself will break the 80% penetration mark by the end of Q2 2009.

Some 100 million PCs are believed to have successfully installed Adobe's AIR runtime platform -- and by "successfully," the company means, it's running and active and without trouble. That's based on the company's own statistics about downloads.

But what does that mean relative to the competition? Microsoft hasn't been specific about the relative penetration of its own Silverlight platform. However, the independent Web site RIAStats.com has been displaying a running tally of installations of rich Internet application platforms based on traffic among tracked sites -- currently numbering over 900,000 in the last 30 days alone. Nearly 50% of sites tracked have Flash Player 9 installed, with over 45% having Flash 10. Meanwhile, only 15.2% of sites have Silverlight version 2 installed, and 2.29% with Silverlight 1. That's about 157,500 Silverlight machines spotted.

But if those percentages are accurate relative to Adobe, that would mean about 18.3 million Silvelight installations worldwide by comparison. Let's see if Microsoft can corroborate that figure.