Is the Live.com team working on support for Google's universal gadget manifest format? You can't load a Google gadget manifest yet, but there are signs that it's not far off.
Microsoft doesn't want to be the Betamax of the gadget world. Like Sony, Microsoft's format is technically superior to the competition. When writing a Microsoft gadgets, the developer must abide by the Atlas framework; meaning JavaScript classes, initialize and dispose methods, bindings, inheritance and interfaces. Google went with a flexible format more like a traditional web page and therefore more familiar to web developers. For the most part, if you can write a web page, you can make a Google gadget; not so with Microsoft's. There is only a small school of Atlas savvy fish swimming in an overwhelming sea of web developers. Therefore it's simple: fewer Atlas developers means fewer Microsoft gadgets.
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