War on Silverlight

Now, if you've been keeping up with IT news (or if you haven't), you've probably heard of Microsoft Silverlight, the pathetic inferior alternative to Adobe Flash Player. Everyone knows that soon, Google will come up with something like gPlayer that will own both of them, but thats beside the point for now. What isn't beside the point is how Microsft spammed the words "cross-platform" all over their website. Just take a look at this bullshit that's just their front page:



And "cross-platform" is already used twice on the front page. But the front page is just skin deep. Let's delve a bit deeper:



As you can see on the first dot point, even Microsoft themselves are admitting that Silverlight is based on a shithouse rip-off of Java. And they don't really expect me to believe that Microsoft changed their "don't-give-a-fuck" stance towards W3C standards. Not far after that they pull the classic Microsoft stunt of trying to sound cool with buzz words and then using the words "cross-platform" again.

So I decided to take it upon myself to find out how much Microsoft really does care about W3C standards by running a CSS validation on their Silverlight website: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fsilverlight%2Fwhy-flexible.aspx&warning=1&profile=css21&usermedium=all.



Evidently not much... When W3C HTML validator goes back up, I will do a HTML validation on their site too.



Now, I don't know if anyone other than anyone at Microsoft would consider supporting just Windows and Mac OS X as cross-platform. What about those other users that use GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD or Solaris or OS/2, etc. I wish to congratulate Microsoft on their excellent support of 2 platforms. It's quite an achievement for them, since they usually only support half (ie. broken support of just Windows).



The final verdict: Just another piece of bullshit with a cool looking logo.