&gt; It&#x27;s not a question of $ or of liking MS, it is a question of trust. Microsoft can and will suddenly discontinue entire solutions like Silverlight.<p>In all fairness all technology companies are like that. Hell even open source groups are like that. If the community disappears why would you continue to invest millions into it when better solutions are coming around the corner? Silverlight, for a while, was absolute king in video streaming (you could squeeze much more quality out of it than flash) but like with everything on the web unless it&#x27;s strictly standards-based you&#x27;re going to run the risk of it being discontinued when better standards come around.<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s really a fair knock against Microsoft.<p>&gt; It will also make its return to the desktop one day when someone figures out how to make it suck less, as the language and the available libraries are awesome.<p>Good luck with that; it&#x27;s going to take a desktop OS who can make a Java GUI framework feel native and not horrible and at this point I don&#x27;t know why any of them would invest in this.