I don't get all the hate. I, for one, have been WAITING for Silverlight to kick Adobe in the pants. Microsoft is at least willing to treat us like first class citizens. Read Miguel's blog. MS is giving Novel access to a lot of stuff in order to create an unencumbered feature parity .NET environment (mono), part of which is a completely free Silverlight implementation (Moonlight).

Even if you don't want software that was inspired by MS on your tablet you should at least be smart enough to realize that competition drives innovation. The introduction of a viable flash competitor should motivate Adobe to get off its bum and improve flash.

This is a win-win.

</rant>

No, that is not necessarily the case. One only need to look at how MS has (mis-)treated established protocol and file format standards, such as NetBIOS, HTML, and CSS (...and, those are just the ones I've had direct experience using, where MS's "implementation" of the standard completely broke everything except MS products. Now, you want to hand them another standard to bastardize?? Fine. Just don't be surprised when the MS product line is the only one that works with the "standard" produced by the MS product.


footnotes, for those interested:

1) The only NetBIOS call implemented in the "Microsoft Networking for Novell Networks" was the (positive) response to the "is netbios installed/operational" call. MSFNN responded to that call with affirmation that the complete NetBIOS suite was enabled. As such, you couldn't use any application that actually -depended- on NetBIOS, unless you replaced the MNFNN drivers with Novell's Client32 for Microsoft Windows" (which properly implemented NetBIOS). Microsoft didn't see this as an issue, because it helped them drive Novell (the networking leader, at the time) nearly out of the business.

2) HTML pages created in MS FrontPage would look fine in IE, but not render properly in Netscape (which was, at the time, the leading web browsing software [and, by a long shot! IE was a distant 4th!!]). MS pretended it must be a Netscape problem (and not a FrontPage problem), because things looked just fine in their browser, IE. It turns out that FrontPage was forgetting to put </table> tags at the end of their tables, and rather than fix that, they patched IE to "assume" the end of the table and render the page anyway. Netscape (and every other sane HTML browser/interpreter!) simply followed the HTML specifications, which clearly state that any incomplete container (such as, for instance, a table) should be ignored and not rendered. Well, you see who won that battle, don't you?

thing is i think that microsoft see that they can no longer keep fighting on the app and os level, so they are moving to other areas and trying to shore up a controlling share in services and frameworks, stuff that can be server side rather then client side (a area in rapid commoditisation, or something like that).

thing is that they can use their existing market share in os and apps to leverage this, as they can more or less guarantee that if people keep their systems up to date (thanks to autopatching) they can roll out stuff like silverlight to all platforms by defining it as a critical update.

then they can say that for the webpages out there it will just work when a user browse/use a silverlight based page/service.

also, one can use the iis server and visual studio.net to have a integrated package for development and deployment. and as .net gets more languages under its belt, anyone that know a .net supported language can write a silverlight service.

i would not be surprised if microsoft finds a way to leverage xna for rapid game deployment on the iphone and ipod, now that they have a foothold with the exchange sync.

The difference here is that the NIT isn't a standard. It's a platform. (and you left Kerberos out of the important standards that MS sought to trash through embrace&extend)

It's more comparable to the presence of MS applications and frameworks on a Mac. MS doesn't destabilize nor undermine the Mac by having apps on it. It just gives Mac users choices to have those apps supported on a Mac. That might be different if the platform where to come to DEPEND upon the MS frameworks and apps (and that was a problem for the Mac in the past, where they desperately needed MS to keep developing Office for the Mac), but as long as it's optional, and there are vigorously developed alternatives, it's not a problem.

ooxml...

can someone say wolf in sheeps clothing?

and lets not for one moment think apple is any better. iirc they didnt put odf support into their recent office pack...

still, i cant help worry about what ibm and sun is planning, ones their assistance of open source have brought MS out of the way (it will not fall, not by a long shot)...

C128, and Kaypros, before we ever got an IBM, and really IBM deserves more credit for the IBM PC than MS; they got MS to write an OS after they had trouble getting anyone else too, but it was their project, not MS,
Really, though, as far as the commoditized IBM-PC compatible system, which I assume is the topic here, you can thank Phoenix for the BIOS!

and what a time for lawyers that was...

Aha! but MS didn't write MS-DOS, either! They co-opted some ground-breaking work done by others (namely, Digital Research), and called it their own.

I know, but didn't want to get bogged down in details that would inspire demands for substantiation; my point was simply that credit belongs elsewhere b/c MS did nothing important (yes, stealing software can be important).

While I can appreciate both sides of the coin here, I don't know I understand what all of the fuss is. If you don't want it, don't install it. For those of us who are used to blocking, disabling and even avoiding websites utilizing technologies and languages we dislike can continue to do so. Nothing to see here.

But really, the IT needs to support as much as possible. The reason I got my N810 was BECAUSE it supported Flash better than most hand held devices in addition to all of the other wonderful stuff I wanted it to do. By making this and future Nokia IT devices more popular, your development efforts will actually be put to a wider spread usage. Nokia will keep putting them out. and some of you can continue to NOT use things like Flash or Silverlight.

Doesn't everyone win here?

BTW, for those of you who vaguely remember where I work, Adobe came in and you can tell they are sharting themselves over Silverlight. Their next incarnation of streaming will include the ability to gracefully change bitrates on the fly, much like Move Networks flash playback mashup.