Early Adoption or User Antagonism?

I’m faced with a conundrum at The Office. I will be embarking on a web project starting from next week, to be ready for a go-live at the end of July. Among the many (MANY) tasks that need to be done, one is the addition of a “widget” on the home page.

Now part of the reason for this update is to bring the website kicking and screaming into the new millennium. No more 800 x 600 resolution, no more tables upon tables upon tables… I’m going for standards compliance all the way. But the company also hopes to position itself as a technology-aware business and technology adopter / enabler. So for the aforementioned widget, I am looking at Silverlight as a way to provide rich UI and functionality on top of the new site’s layout.

And there’s my problem: Silverlight certainly doesn’t have the sort of market penetration that Adobe Flash enjoys. Users of the site will need to install the Silverlight player and many may not recognise the name as readily as they might with Flash. On the other hand, we as Microsoft developers will be able to support and add to any Silverlight applications we develop because it’s all built on the .Net framework. Flash and ActionScript skills are much harder to find at an acceptable level within our business department.

My instinct is to push ahead with Silverlight because this will drive that message of “We are a technology business”. We want to show users that we want to provide tools and resources that cater to the modern computer user and the modern bank customer: RSS, AJAX, web standards and user-generated content. But is this a gamble or a sound business decision?