I don't think you're off the mark at all. When I say Silverlight is "successful" I mean that it has gained a reasonable installation base (> 50%) in a short pe

I don't think you're off the mark at all. When I say Silverlight is "successful" I mean that it has gained a reasonable installation base (> 50%) in a short period of time (3 years). In early 2009, Silverlight's installation base was only 20%, so it's clearly making inroads. Will Silverlight ever get Flash-like install numbers? I doubt it, but I also don't think it needs to have those numbers in order to be considered successful. If Microsoft could get the kind of adoption rates for WP7 as it has for Silverlight, I think they would be very pleased. Of course, phones are a little more difficult because it's much more likely to be a binary decision - people can have Flash AND Silverlight at no cost; I doubt there will be many people interested in owning an iPhone / Android phone PLUS a Windows phone. It's become way too common to see people slagging on Microsoft gear without providing any kind of detail, so I'm just going to start asking them for some kind of backing data. Now, if the OP had said "is this the next Xbox, or is it the next Kin?", then I probably wouldn't have had anything to say about the matter.