Microsoft Has Seen The Light. And It’s Not Silverlight.

Microsoft’s new IE9 web browser (which is in public beta testing) will be a big part of this strategy. And presumably, a lot of the things that currently require Silverlight, like some of those nifty Bing Maps features, will move to HTML5 going forward. Again, that’s great news.

So why is Microsoft doing this? It seems that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. They likely know that’s it’s going to be much harder to make a dent in the new developer world order with Silverlight, which still has a relatively small market penetration and no penetration in mobile, than with HTML5, which is (or shortly will be) everywhere — including all of Apple’s devices.

“HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia told Foley.

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