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Cross-Platform Microsoft
willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
John Carroll the author of the FUD piece, who literally spent years doing trolling the ZDNet talkback forums back in the day in support of Microsoft, so much so that, lo and behold, he was then given a column of his own to write Microsoft FUD articles, and was eventually, in 2005 awarded with a job at Microsoft, something he's been hoping for for years (only took him something like 7 years). The guy is the biggest shill for Microsoft I have ever seen. He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole .Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants. It is HIS JOB to paint Microsoft in a favourable light and as being better than anything else.
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
You have to be joking, right?