Mary Jo Foley created a little bit of a firestorm in the Microsoft world. Especially the developer community, when she quoted Bob Muglia, Microsoft President of Server and Tools Business division, saying that the company was shifting it’s attention from Silverlight to HTML5.

Apparently it seems that even while Muglia feels that Silverlight will continue as its development platform, the company’s strategy has shifted.

Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

It is understandable that Microsoft is going this route even though HTML5 isn’t a finalized web standard. The fact that its major competitors, Apple, Google, and Adobe, are all headed down this road means that Microsoft has no choice but to jump in on the bandwagon.

This got me to thinking about a couple of pros and cons about Microsoft’s apparent new-found love for HTML5, and given the company’s past, what it bodes for the future for both users and developers.

On the pro side:

The HTML5 genie is out of the bottle and there is no way it is going to go any direction other than forward.  As I said above, HTML5 is a yet to be a fully finalized and approved web standard, which means that even at this point it is still open to changes.

Even though HTML5 is still at this midpoint, typically hesitant companies are embracing the new technology and features that HTML5 is bringing to the table. While their motives might be questionable there is no denying that having companies like Apple and Google hopping on board the way they have hasn’t had a huge effect on the momentum driving HTML5 forward.

As much as the tech world loves to ignore, or ridicule Microsoft and its efforts on the web, that doesn’t change the fact that what the company does still has a huge impact. So for Microsoft to come out and publicly throw its weight behind HTML5 as it did at this year’s PDC only cements HTML5 as the next powerhouse web technology.

Granted there is still a very bitter taste left in the mouths of both developers and users when it comes to Microsoft’s embracing of any technology; but I think that there is a major shift in culture happening at the company, and as such we need to look at what happens going forward with a fresh set of eyes.

As much as Apple and Google are the darlings of the tech world, Microsoft’s incredible reach in the developer community means that when they embrace a technology it can have a far reaching effect and one would hope, with this new mindset, that Microsoft’s involvement with HTML5 will add a large and incredibly talented developer community into the mix.

If this is the case we could see HTML5 adoption increase exponentially, not to mention speed up the ratification of it as a solid web standard. When this happens it’s not only the developers of all persuasions that will benefit but more importantly the users come out as winners as well.

On the con side:

As I pointed out above Microsoft has a very storied past when it comes to the adoption of any technology. One just has to mention things like IE6 and ActiveX and then sit back to watch the pained looks pass across the faces of developers and listen to the rapid fire uttering of expletives that could make a trucker blush.

Microsoft’s history of taking ownership of technology has lead to much of the distrust, and even downright condemnation of the company. Name a technology, and somewhere you will find Microsoft’s fingers in the mix, most of the time in a manner meant to warp it into something that they could control.

Now, I might like to believe that there is a culture shift happening in the company, but that doesn’t mean that this adoption of HTML5 is safe from the old Microsoft adherents, who still have  a lot of sway in the company.

This is the danger that still exists. The fact that just as Microsoft heads into this adoption of HTML5, it will look to bastardize it in whatever way that it can in order to add some exclusive marketable version of it.  It’s not like Microsoft doesn’t have a history of this, but given what I have seen happening – company-wide – I have my fingers crossed.

In the end….

For the past couple of years Microsoft has been trying hard to position Silverlight as its main Rich Internet Applications (RIA) platform, but it really hasn’t come into its own until Windows Phone 7. Even though Muglia has said that Microsoft will be releasing a fifth version of the platform, one has to wonder what happens after that with the company’s apparent strong push into HTML5.

Just as Microsoft has a history of trying to take ownership of any new technology, it also has a history of abandoning its developers.  One just has to remember back to the days of Visual Basic 6 and the advent of the first generation of .NET. Even more recently there is a lot of debate going on as to whether Microsoft will be abandoning Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in favor of Silverlight.

Regardless of this, HTML5 is slated to be the next major innovation when it comes to web technology, and I would like to believe that with Microsoft throwing its support behind it we will be able to create and use a much better, and even more interactive, Web.

Let’s just hope that the sea of change that is apparently moving through Redmond will continue, and that the days of things like IE6 are far behind us. I don’t think Microsoft can afford to return to those days. So I remain hopeful from a user point of view and totally unsure as an ex-developer.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]