[dfox]

Microsoft Tag is complete application built on top of their proprietary symbology, which is part of the problem, because the tag itself does not bear information, it's only reference into some "highly scalable and flexible architecture". And for that, Code 128 might be better solution than their proprietary colorful triangles :)

By the way, we use Code 128-A with base32 encoding for our convention registration system as to simplify the situation when code cannot be read by reader and has to be typed in manually (on the basis that it is less error prone to type two five character blocks of base32 than significantly longer decimal number).