Jackson, not to be too bitchy, but the writers usually put some text after the jump. Although you did finally figure out how to close with a pithy ending. I'll give you points for that.

Flash is the modern-day equivalent of the blink tag so a broken version of Flash developed by Microsoft seems totally appropriate.

What choice did Microsoft have? Macromedia, with Flash, came out with a slow, buggy piece of garbage that is universally hated by developers and users yet everyone is forced to live with. To maintain their image as the premier totalitarian computer torturer MS was forced to respond and respond they did.

Not only did they release Silverlight far after it was irrelevant to do so but also made it slower, buggier and less compatible than the binary abomination that is Flash.

The race for perpetrator of the most middleware-driven suicides is officially tied.

I saw an early preview of Silverlight that talked about how pervasive it would be and how Microsoft was doing extensive testing (blah blah blah, where have I heard that before).

Since then I've heard nothing to indicate that Microsoft is involved with anything other than making (or trying to make) it work under ideal clinical conditions on Microsoft's own platform.

Business as usual.

Adobe, for all its faults has done a pretty good job of being platform agnostic. PDF files and Flash files tend to just work wherever you run them except in situations where vendors have gone out of their way to make them not work (iPhone).

Don't forget Sun - they released their pitiful JavaFX, or whatever the fck it's called, so Microsoft won't feel like TOO big of a failure here.

@WagCurious: I told you, the twinkies are gone. It's no use.