Microsoft leveraging Silverlight and riling critics
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SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft will offer U.S. Web surfers this month thousands of hours of free video direct from the Olympics in Beijing.
The service, produced in conjunction with NBC, is being hailed as a bold experiment in delivering on the original promise of the Web. For the first time, it will be possible to watch specific events on demand as well as many of the less popular sporting events, which have received scant attention in mainstream television coverage of the games.
But there's a catch. To view the video, it will be necessary to download a Microsoft Web browser software component based on a new proprietary technology, Silverlight, that is intended to make it possible to display interactive animations, graphics, audio and video, all within a fixed window inside a Web browser display.
Silverlight will work for both Macintosh and Windows PC users, and a version for Linux is also available. A mobile version will be available on Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones.
Microsoft executives say Silverlight will "light up the Web" with multimedia content.
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But for many executives who compete with Microsoft, the Silverlight strategy recalls a U.S. antitrust case in which Microsoft was found guilty of using its market muscle to stifle competition from the Web.
By bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, Microsoft destroyed Netscape Communications, Explorer's main competitor. But it also incurred the wrath of the U.S. Justice Department and embroiled itself in an antitrust lawsuit.
Now Microsoft is taking on another rival, Adobe, whose Flash media player is by far the dominant technology for streaming interactive content and video. Adobe, based in San Jose, California, controls roughly 99 percent of the market for streaming software. Windows Media, from Microsoft, and Quicktime, from Apple, trail.
"Silverlight is obviously mostly about Flash and competing with Adobe," said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla, the developer of the open-source Firefox browser.
Others take a darker view of Microsoft's intentions and argue that Silverlight is simply a rehash of the company's 1990s-era "embrace and extend" strategy for pre-empting Web competition.
"They're still playing the same games," said Michael Nelson, professor of Internet studies at Georgetown University. "It's a way to lock up the content, and it's not enabling as much innovation as we would like to see."
The perception that the software publisher is still looking for ways to gain proprietary advantage was underscored last year in a filing by seven states and the District of Columbia that asked a U.S. government court to extend the set of restrictions under which Microsoft has been operating as a result of the antitrust lawsuit.
The lawyers for the states argued that if Microsoft were to favor Silverlight in the next version of its operating system, as it tried to favor its desktop search program in Vista, it would have a significant advantage against Adobe.
Open systems like the Linux operating system and standard protocols, like HTTP, which is the basis for the World Wide Web, have become a growing economic force. In some cases, standards complement proprietary systems. In others, they compete with those technologies.
A Microsoft executive defended the company's strategy in developing Silverlight, arguing that strictly adhering to standards made it difficult, if not impossible, to innovate.
"It's a Catch-22 situation," said Brian Goldfarb, who oversees several products, including Silverlight, at Microsoft. Goldfarb said the company was committed to making its products compatible with systems based on common standards.
"Standards are not the only way to be open," Goldfarb said. Moreover, he noted that Microsoft increasingly participated in standards groups. "One of the areas where we don't get a lot of credit is for Ajax," a technology that he said lies at the foundation of the modern Web, known as Web 2.0.
At the same time, he acknowledged the proprietary limitations of Silverlight. Microsoft is the only vendor selling software tools needed to produce interactive and video content for Silverlight. He also acknowledged that the company had no plans to make the digital rights-management technology in Silverlight, known as PlayReady, available on servers other than Microsoft's.
Despite its investment, Microsoft faces significant challenges in unseating Flash, which will be used to stream Olympics video in many other countries, including China, Japan and Australia. According to Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief technology officer, there is a major philosophical difference between the two companies.
"The question is, are you trying to advantage one particular operating system?" he said, pointing to Microsoft's decision to reserve certain features like 3-D effects and downloading for the company's Windows Vista operating system.
There is another viewpoint on the Adobe versus Microsoft versus Apple war, one that argues that the giant companies are fighting the last war rather than the coming one.
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