"If you really step back and look at it, despite all of the amazing things people are doing inside of the browser, real, ground-level innovation just isn’t happening unless it comes from companies like Adobe or Microsoft... I’m not trying to disparage the open web. I think if the open web could move at the speed of a private company, we’d all be better off."

The standards vs. proprietary debate has popped up again (see the linked post as well). I think they're complementary really, another tool in the toolbox. It would be interesting to see the adoption rates of languages other than Javascript in Silverlight. I wonder why no one just creates an IE plugin to cater for its shortcomings - is that possible?