As the article points out, the big wildcard is Microsoft. I don't see what logical reason Microsoft has for skipping VP8 other than the anti-Google animosity, but that has led to illogical decisions on their part before.
By now I tend to just assume that Internet Explorer is going to always do the bare minimum needed to maintain its dominant position, while holding back support for whatever people want. I hate it when I develop a cool web app and it works perfectly on everything except IE, where it's broken in new and excitingly different ways on each of the major versions.
I haven't tried this in IE for a while, but can't we do something like push down an ActiveX control or plugin to render this video with IE pretty trivially? It would simply become part of the magic incantation web developers would use to embed video.
Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE.
Unless Microsoft actively moves to block it, I don't know that Microsoft's explicit support is actually that interesting.
/Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE./
That's exactly how Flash won its dominance. It was installed by the PC manufacturers (HP, Apple, Dell, &c) into IE5 and IE6 until it had overwhelming market presence.
Adding video support later on cemented the position, but it was strippers and steaks (for HP, Dell, Apple, &c execs) that won Flash its position.
If they can make sure H.264 become the standard, then that's a big problem for firefox, which is good for Microsoft, so it wouldn't be totally illogical for them to skip VP8.
