Microsoft Silverlight is a competitor to Adobe Flash. If you watched the Olympics this summer online on NBC, you had to download Silverlight first. The Redmond company has been trying to develop Silverlight for the iPhone (so has Adobe with Flash). But Microsoft has been frustrated by longtime rival Apple's apparent unwillingness to accept the software:

According to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Apple is far from ready to enable plug-ins like Silverlight and Adobe's Flash. "Basically where we're at right now is we have talked with Apple," Guthrie admitted. "We are very interested in being able to run [Silverlight] on the iPhone. At the end of the day, Apple ultimately controls what software runs on the iPhone.

It may thus turn to its online Nemesis Google and the latter's open-source Android platform:

"[The] Google phone is slightly different." Guthrie added.

"It's more of an open platform, that is something we're going to continue to look at. Certainly as it's gotten deployed and if sales are good we'll definitely keep our eyes out and look at that in the future."

There are many ironies here. But ultimately the iPhone will need to run some version of Flash or its equivalent. There's just too much flash (espeically video) on the Internet that won't play on the iPhone.