Google Wave vs Microsoft Silver light Application

Fatal comparisons are made between the widely energetic developer responses to Google Wave Application yesterday with the relatively warm response to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silver light as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave Application. Both Silver light and Wave are aimed at taking the Internet experience to the different level. To be perfectly honest, Silver light is a great piece of technology. Google Wave Application, as yet, is not much more than a concept and a declaration.

Let’s try to imagine what Google Silver light would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silver light VM inter operate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silver light based applications by now – as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silver light. Please note that this has nothing to do with the technology: as I said before, I happen to agree that Silver light is a great piece of technology.

What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE.  IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX – but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as “online Word pad”, as Bill Gates put it.

That brings us back to Google:Today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Creative are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us. Could Google abuse its position?