I can see where you are going with this train of thought, but Microsoft really blew it when it came to providing too much functionality to the web before having

I can see where you are going with this train of thought, but Microsoft really blew it when it came to providing too much functionality to the web before having a fully formed plan. The amount of security issues was a precursor for basically every web based plugin technology that came after it (ActiveX, Java Applets, Flash/Macromedia Director, Silverlight, etc.). I'm not sure on Silverlight vulnerabilities, because I had been forced to learn ActionScript 3 with Flash, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It's very possible that Silverlight wasn't full of security issues, and was a good technology that was just killed along with general plugin technology when Apple stopped supporting Flash.