I have written for Ziff Davis, CMP, and a number of other technical publications so you can imagine my surprise when I saw the following when I dared to suggest that Microsofts SilverLight was less then completely Cross Browser and Cross Platform but which Darryl Taft so blandly and blindly repeats over and over again in his reports on the Microsoft technology:
Now I have not commented on eWeek or Ziff Davis sites for over half a year so I can hardly imagine how I earned this dubious distinction. I may be wry but I am hardly irresponsible. And as anyone can see from recent postings- a)I am equally tough on all vendors when they are off the mark and b)Microsoft gets praise when their efforts warrant and are without proprietary taint.
The latter point is an important issue because the market is demanding Open, Interoperable and Accessible while Microsoft is delivering ever more tightly coupled, increasingly will-work-best-only- in Vista, and highly proprietary software and services. Cross Platform and Cross Browser are simply not being vigorously, directly and openly offered by Microsoft- despite their boasted upon, but truly feeble efforts in SilverLight.
But in the longer view it does not bode well when eWeek curtails valid feedback – they are diminished, and greatly by this. In fact this is the same malaise brought up by Al Gore in his books An Inconvenient Truth plus The Assault on Reason. Gore is arguing that several critical national policy issues are just not raised and debated in public fora. Time magazine also raises the same issue in its June 11th edition – Why Obama Tells Inconvenient Truths :And what it may cost him. There simply is less and less tolerance, even in the press, for forceful, divergent but well substantiated debate on critical issues. One of those issues is how long can IT and the business community afford an enormous, zero-sum monopolist and Machavellian key player like Microsoft many times arbitrarily dictating standards and policies to the IT community.
(c)JBSurveyer 2007 If you liked this, let others know:
Slashdot 
Digg 
del.icio.us 
reddit 
newsvine 
Y! MyWeb