[b0]

Some little known facts which point to your assertions being wrong:

1. IE4 worked on UNIX (Solaris/HP-UX) and supported ActiveX.

2. MainSoft provided tools to port your ActiveX to UNIX (Usually a straight recompilation and little else required).

3. Other vendors are allowed to use Silverlight - look: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

4. ActiveX,COM,MSRPC are all open specifications here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(v=prot.10)

1-2 died because there was lack of demand.

3 died because there was lack of demand and MS decided it was the wrong route.

4 is used by MANY open source projects from Samba to tsclient.

As far as improving things goes, I've had many a thing fixed by Microsoft over the years. They ALWAYS solve a problem.