"I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?"

--Microsoft's chief evangelist

Summary: Yet another revelation that Microsoft uses pressure and blackmail to throw competitors out of conferences that it does not run; more evidence surfaces which shows that WPF and Silverlight are dying

Microsoft not only crashes or attempts to "kill" the events of rivals (most recently OpenOffice.org but also LinuxTag 2010 [1, 2, 3]); sometimes it invades other companies' event or a companies-neutral events and then ejects rivals from it. Not so long ago we learned that "Microsoft refused to sponsor the conference unless the conference organizers denied Zimbra the opportunity to take a big, prominent booth at the event."

Now we have another example like that. Jaleman wrote earlier today: "My talk for cloudconf got refused because Microsoft gets to approve every speaker and they don't like us."

It is worth documenting this type of stuff; otherwise, those who claims that Microsoft would withdraw funding based on the agenda (a form of blackmail) can be called "paranoid".

“Former Microsoft managers confirm what I predicted 2 years ago WPF and Silverlight are dead.”
      --JalemanJaleman had another interesting tweet earlier today, one where he said that "Former Microsoft managers confirm what I predicted 2 years ago WPF and Silverlight are dead. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/363"

This is a subject which we covered before [1, 2, 3]. Maybe that's why we no longer hear about Moonlight, either. Just to think that Microsoft MVP de Icaza urged GNU/Linux developers to embrace WPF, another dead horse. What kind of clown does he look like now? Marketing dunce for Microsoft pretending to still be a "FOSS guy"? Or that Microsoft is a friend? Delusion is the worst form of reassurance, ignorance is another. ⬆