What do the Microsoft plugins have to do with developing tools for the open web or not? The plug-ins you're complaining about: * The Windows Live Sign-in Assis

What do the Microsoft plugins have to do with developing tools for the open web or not? The plug-ins you're complaining about: * The Windows Live Sign-in Assistant enables you to automatically sign in to Windows Live websites when you're already signed in with, say, Messenger on your PC, something that's a net win for Messenger users and which really has no web-reasonable implementation. Why is this evil, exactly? * The Office Live plugin allows users to open documents saved on SkyDrive from their browser in the Office clients. This also works with Office Live Workspaces (for users of that older product) and Sharepoint. Again, why is this evil? I'm pretty sure that if there were a way to make these things work without needing to use plugins, that's something the team would pursue. But there isn't, so to make the experience of Windows Live and Office users better, these plugins get installed with those products. This seems to be pretty intuitive to me. (Disclosure, I work at MS.)