IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE.

Please note that this has nothing to do with the technology: as I said before, I happen to agree that Silverlight is a great piece of technology. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now – as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. It would have all the technical specifications published openly. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. Apple’s resurgence – based on design prowess, not platform dominance – and Vista’s failure, have demonstrated that convincingly. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome …), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft’s commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let’s recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. It is easy to dismiss all this with “Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft,” but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google’s innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.

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