Noticed that Miguel speculating about a Linux version of Silverlight. Personally I hope
we do not see such a announcement. Everytime Microsoft has promised Unix support its been done to rob their cross platform competitor of the argument and in the end not delivering. I remember Windows Media Player being announced for Unix back in the day when Microsoft where in the process of trying to kill off Real networks as a competitor in the streaming media space. In the end all they ever produced was a broken alpha release for Solaris and in the end they never released a final version for either Solaris or any other promised platform. Another example of such a sabotage targeted ‘port’ was Internet explorer for Unix, which Microsoft made as part of their effort to take down Netscape, which never came further than some hackish versions for Solaris and HP-UX before getting canceled.
Do we really want to see Microsoft try the same technique again? Sadly enough I doubt the mainstream press is observant enough to call Microsoft on their game even if its the Nth time they do it.
Miguel has been Microsoft’s bitch for a long time now. Probably since they refused to give him a job…
I wholeheartedly agree. Didn’t know about RealPlayer, but I installed IE on Solaris a long time ago. What a mess.
Let’s not give Microsoft any more monopolies. Please?
The only good thing that might come out of this is if Adobe were to realize this is what Microsoft is trying to do, and start opening up Flash more. They’re already cooperating with Mozilla on developing ECMAscript, after all.
Not sure if this is true or not, but supposedly right now (and since Macromedia days) one cannot work on a Flash reimplementation if one’s had the Flash player installed on a computer (not even looking at the source!)
@anon: be aware that Miguel did not say anything about thinking Silverlight for Linux being a great idea. He just said it was one of the things he thought could end up being announced by Microsoft.