05.12.09
New York Times — Just Like National Baseball — Dumps Microsoft Silverlight
Summary: Microsoft’s GNU/Linux-hostile vision of the Web is not catching on
LAST YEAR we wrote about the New York Times promoting Silverlight from Microsoft. This was not surprising given the strong relationship between those two. Just months ago there was a rumour that Microsoft would buy the New York Times and the selection of Silverlight — as bad a technology as it is — was no good sign. Microsoft, however, does pay (bribe) customers rather than charging them, as revealed last year by Adobe.
For technical reasons alone the New York Times is now dumping Silverlight and replacing it with another proprietary piece of software which at least works on GNU/Linux.
Having begun my day by sniping at the New York Times, I wanted to end it by complimenting it: The company released version 2.0 of its Times Reader application today. The new version–which dumps Microsoft’s Silverlight platform for Adobe’s AIR–runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and in many ways it’s an impressive piece of work.
This would be demoralising to Microsoft not just because it’s a lost customer but also because it represents Microsoft’s lost ground on the Web.
“Maybe they don’t prepare to buy anything and they simply bluff by passing money between accounts.”We’ve learned that Microsoft is very envious and scared of Google these days. A reader told us today that “at OFESUmmitt2009, there was a Microsoft lobbyist asking a stupid question about antitrust of Google+Chrome and at the end of the conference there was one guy who asked why Microsoft was not invited.”
Microsoft was perhaps not invited because it’s suing competitors and calls them “cancer”.
“It is funny they focus on Google,” says our reader, “they see it as the enemy.”
Just how bad is Microsoft doing? Well, earlier today we wrote about Microsoft taking debt and now we find that, contrary to speculations, “Microsoft insists debt issue[is] not a prelude to SAP bid.” Maybe they just have no money. Maybe they don’t prepare to buy anything and they simply bluff by passing money between accounts. Who knows?
One reader asks whether Microsoft is “drowning in red ink,” saying that “the scan needs to get shut down before it drags down more of the world’s economy. The depression is worse than it needs to be because of the decreased efficiency and increase TCO from Microsoft products. Then there are the worms.” █
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twitter said,
May 12, 2009 at 9:16 pm
This news linked in the M$ Death Watch. Jim Alchin was right about the importance of media to M$. It was an important source of revenue, lockin and platform promotion. As the importance of broadcast itself fades, the non free video fromats will fall by the wayside. M$’s greedy plans for media control, license revenue and patent extortion look less likely than ever. If that was M$’s way of escaping the decline of the Windows and Office franchises, they had better cook up a new business model.
aeshna23 said,
May 13, 2009 at 11:04 am
As much as I would like M$ to go away, it would not be good for it to go bankrupt right now. Who would do the necessary security updates for the existing M$ machines? And how would they be distributed? It’s better that M$ slowly peters out rather disappearing in a bang.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
May 13th, 2009 at 11:07 am
For security reasons they usually have arrangements of support/patches. See the Eudura/Thunderbird/Mozilla situation for example.