In a week when Microsoft unveils its new Bing search engine and Google announced Google Wave, online document company Zoho has weighed in with its own analysis.

Zoho argues that even when Microsoft develops superior technology the developer community and independent companies such as Zoho will not put their efforts behind it because of suspicion of Microsoft’s motives. Take Silverlight: great technology, argues the blog post, but because of Microsoft’s walled-garden approach, it will not attract widespread adoption.

“What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE. IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX – but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as ‘online Wordpad’, as Bill Gates put it.”