I had much the same train of thought when I saw this article. I've been very harsh on Microsoft since roughly the Active-X era of the late '90s for doing things that benefit their own dominance at the expense of the ecosystem. I WANT them to be good citizens and good competitors. When I see something Microsoft does that really is innovative, I'm happy. And at first glance, that's what I thought of this napkin-map thing. And then I tried to look at a Bing napkin map on this computer - running Ubuntu. They've done it with Silverlight. Back to disappointment.