The dangers of the proprietary web

ZDNet has a good article describing a talk by Tristan Nitot of Mozilla, warning that:

companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

According to Tristan

the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology. Nitot was speaking on the subject of "the dangers of the proprietary web". He described the nature of the web at the moment as open, but suggested that "proprietary solutions running on top of the web are trying to take over". Referring specifically to Flash and Silverlight, he said that "people depend on the vendor to provide them with the runtime.

This all may be true, but as long as Flash is the only way to get multi-media into my web app, the proprietary web will continue to gain ground over the laudable but less capable "Ajax" web.