tl;dr: Based on a comment by Microsoft VP, Julie Larson-Green, that a certain weather application they recently made was done using a platform based on HTML 5 and JS, ars technica's Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform, and then goes into a long rant on how disastrous this will be for all the Windows developers because it will make all their current knowledge useless and will force them to use a suboptimal technology to develop their applications. At the end of the article he concludes that, yeah, that's not actually going to happen, because Microsoft isn't stupid.
> Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform
Actually, unless my memory fails me, it was that Microsoft video showing the tiled interface of Windows 8 that did that - it kind of implied HTML5 was the tool of choice (or, at least, the glue) for tiled and that tiled was the future. The thread kenjackson pointed out tells another story, but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.
The video the article links to has Julie Larson-Green going over the tiled interface. Different video from the one you are referring to I believe, but it covers almost the same exact material in a very similar manner.
Yes, but none of that was a surprise (we knew about Unity, Gnome and KDE 4 long before any of that hit the distros), we could influence the decisions (arguing in favor of other directions) and, if enough people disagree with the the leaders, they can always make a viable fork.
You can't force an open-source developer to work on something he/she doesn't like and agree.
