Can the leopard shed his spots? This month, Microsoft is offering Web surfers in the United States a seductive viewing treat. In conjunction with NBC, the software publisher is offering thousands of hours of free video direct from the Olympics in Beijing. The service is being hailed as a bold experiment in delivering on the original promise of the World Wide Web. For the first time, it will be possible to watch specific events on demand as well as to watch many of the less popular sporting events like cycling and race walking, which in the past 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. The Silverlight technology will allow streaming of video and interactive applications like video games to both Macintosh and Windows PC users. (For example, the new Netflix streaming service is based on Silverlight.) A version for Linux users is available via a joint project with Novell, and a mobile version will be available in the future on Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones. Microsoft executives say Silverlight will “light up the Web” with multimedia content. But for many industry executives who compete with Microsoft, the world's largest software company, the Silverlight strategy recalls a federal 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 Justice Department and embroiled itself in the bitter 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. The product from Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., is on roughly 99 percent of computers connected to the Internet, based in large part on the popularity of YouTube, owned by Google; YouTube uses the Flash standard to stream videos. Windows Media, from Microsoft, and Quicktime, from Apple, trail behind. “Silverlight is obviously mostly about Flash and competing with Adobe,” said John Lilly, C.E.O. of the Mozilla Corporation, 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 R. 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.” That perception that the software publisher is still looking for ways to gain proprietary advantage was underscored late last year in a filing by seven states and the District of Columbia that asked a federal 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 give the company a significant advantage in competing 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, saying the company was committed to making its products compatible with systems based on common standards. “It's a Catch-22 situation,” said Brian Goldfarb, who oversees several products, including Silverlight, at Microsoft. He said the company believes that strictly adhering to standards makes it difficult, if not impossible, to innovate. “Standards are not the only way to be open,” Goldfarb said. Moreover, he noted that Microsoft increasingly does participate 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 needed to produce interactive and video content for Silverlight. He also acknowledged that the company also has no plans to make the digital rights-management technology in Silverlight, known as PlayReady, available on servers other than Microsoft's. Microsoft faces significant challenges in unseating Flash, which will be used to stream Olympics video in many other countries, including China, Japan and Australia. – The New York Times __
