

Microsoft Has Seen The Light. And It’s Not Silverlight. - Garbage
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/30/rip-silverlight-on-the-web/

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raganwald
If we're going to discuss this again, I might as well introduce an expression
I didn't see in the last piece on HTML5 vs. Silverlight:

"Embrace. Extend. Extinguish."

Perhaps Microsoft embracing HTML5 is merely a return to their old strategy of
luring customers into using their technologies in the hopes of introducing
enough incompatibility over time that the "standard" becomes useless and dies?

~~~
TomOfTTB
I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push
incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer
was by far more standards compliant than Netscape (at least through version
5).

Microsoft's problem, IMHO, is they compete in two different ways. The first is
the "catch up to the competitor that's beating us" phase. In this phase they
usually allow engineers more control of the process so they can iterate fast
enough to over take a competitor. Think IE (Netscape), Office (Wordperfect),
Windows NT (Novell/IBM), etc...

Once they overtake a competitor the big company aspect takes over with
"managers" wanting to (a) take credit for the success and (b) create
"strategic plans" to cement the success. That's when you start to see
incompatibilities (and other stupid management tricks like pulling IE from
every platform other than Windows).

So as someone who has watched Microsoft for a long time I feel confident in
saying they'll produce fairly compliant tools right up to the point where they
gain some success in the market.

~~~
btilly
_I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push
incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer
was by far more standards compliant than Netscape (at least through version
5)._

That's not how I remember it.

Microsoft pushed lots of incompatibilities that had no uptake. (VBScript
anyone?) Microsoft added lots of extensions to the standard. Because Microsoft
did a good job on them, many made it into the standard and so now look
standards compliant. (XML-RPC anyone?) But from the point of view of cross-
browser compatibility, they were bad news at the time.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I think you're remembering things from a Netscape perspective. For example you
cite vbscript which was introduced a mere 8 months after Javascript (which was
called livescript at the time to match Netscape Livewire). So they were
competing technologies and not either side ignoring a standard (MS to their
credit quickly rushed jscript out when Javascript started to become dominant)

(Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. Javascript was implemented by Netscape
in Dec. '95. MS implemented Jscript in Aug 1996. Javascript was adopted as the
ECMAScript standard in June '97)

As for extensions I don't think you can consider those incompatibilities. Both
sides were doing it. Yet on the Netscape side they were actually taking parts
of the standard and not implementing them (which is something the open source
team had to straighten out after it was turned over:
<http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html>)

You can even find old IE reviews that point out Microsoft was implementing
standards far quicker (like this one I found via wikipedia:
[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-
expl...](http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-explorer-4))

------
aberkowitz
Now that Microsoft is playing catch up, they cannot afford not to adopt
standards.

~~~
rbanffy
As raganwald pointed out, when they adopt standards they adopt the "embrace,
extend, extinguish" strategy.

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edanm
I wonder how much this decision was based on the troubles Adobe themselves
have had. Conceivably, Microsoft didn't want to get into an all-out war with
Apple's iPhone/iPad platform, like Flash did, and find out they'd lost.
Silverlight is certainly in a worse position to fight Apple than Flash was.

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frou_dh
He used the superfluous "going forward" three times in a short piece. Sorry,
just wanted to gripe.

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djhworld
Silverlight infuriates me because the performance of it on my Mac is abysmal.
I think it's a bit of a throwback to the old ways of the web.

Thankfully not many sites seem to use it.

~~~
tdurden
While I am not a fan, I would have to say that on OSX, it performs better than
Flash.

