Microsoft's Silverlight project, a browser-based Flash competitor, is apparently sparking some concern among the states which sued, and won, against the company based on anti-trust violations. Led by California, a number of those complainants have filed a motion requesting that the presiding judge extend the settlement reached in that case in 2002 for an additional five years, until 2012. Todd Bishop at the Seattle P-I has additional coverage and links to the court documents here.

Although in general I think we can agree that monopoly power is a dangerous thing and that Microsoft has unquestionably exercised that power illegally, there is a different debate over whether or not such tactics are truly to the detriment of the market, at least in the short term, and particularly with respect to corporate computing. As friends of mine at the company frequently lament, a lot of real cool, useful features are regularly either blocked or heavily questioned and delayed on account of their possible impact from the perspective of the anti-trust decree. The types of integration that competitors, and the states involved in the original suit, are concerned about, are often exactly the sorts of integration which make a CIO's life easier and more rewarding. Monopoly power means Standardization, and standards have generally been good to IT departments.

For its part, Microsoft holds the advance of web-based applications up as evidence that they were never really quite the monopoly that they seemed, and certainly aren't one now. But Silverlight can be seen as an effort to extend the same sort of power that was long exercised at the desktop, to the web, as it develops as a venue for rich multimedia applications... all of which will have to run on something at the client side.

Nonetheless, it's debatable as to whether this is a good or bad thing for corporate IT. Choice is an advantage in the consumer mass market, particularly with web-based interoperability, and the decree makes sense in that light, but advantages to organizations, if any, would only come in the longer term after a suitable period of interplay in the marketplace. If your planning horizon extends beyond 2012, well, then you may be in good shape.