But you still have to wonder what this will do to their profitable desktop business, and hence their share value, and hence their shareholder confidence.
I suppose I'm really wondering if Microsoft can turn into an IBM.
Microsoft is known for their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. I think given the chance, they would do the same to WebGL. But at this stage they don't see WebGL as a serious threat: if they do, expect to see WebX, or DirectWeb, or something like that. I think Microsoft is 10x more likely to implement their own 3D Javascript API than to implement WebGL in Internet Explorer.
They were back in the latter 1990s, when the desktop was the new platform and they owned it. Now, handhelds are the new growth platform and MSFT has not gained much of a foothold there; exact marketshare numbers don't matter as much as perception of dominance, and MSFT doesn't have that. They allowed Apple and Google to get too big, instead of being first and achieving lock-in via network effects.
Think back to IBM: They owned the IBM PC platform and forced everyone else to copy them or choose a different platform entirely. Then Compaq beat them to the punch with releasing an 80386-based PC, then the Microchannel bus failed to catch on, and pretty soon IBM was irrelevant to the PC world. (And that isn't even taking into account what MSFT did relative to all this.)
So, if MSFT makes an I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-WebGL, they'll have to deal with the fact Apple and Google know about Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and that MSFT doesn't dominate handhelds. So their proprietary extension will be limited to their devices, which will mean all of the iOS and Android users would be locked out, which means developers would have to choose between targeting a majority of users or MSFT, which means MSFT would have screwed itself sideways with a rake.
I doubt MSFT will screw itself sideways with a rake. However, I also don't see how MSFT can continue its growth without a new platform to dominate.
That said, Microsoft didn't create a competitor to canvas and many other new web APIs (but I don't know how standards-compliant they are these days in terms of Javascript, Canvas, SVG, etc.).
WebGL would have to have a killer app on mobile for Microsoft's lack of mobile presence to hurt them. Currently all WebGL Demos I've seen have assumed a desktop-level of graphics performance, and no phones are "officially" capable of WebGL yet.
I just tried the three.js examples from my Galaxy Nexus (running 4.1) and couldn't get any of them working in either Chrome for Android or the default browser. That said, I know it's possible with some hacking and tweaking. From what I hear iOS has about equivalent support at this stage. That said, Apple and (to a lesser extent) Google could roll out this support pretty easily in an update, but I maintain my initial reservation; that phone hardware will not be performant enough to make WebGL a viable replacement or complement to native OpenGL development on those platforms.
Currently. However, that's how these things tend to start off, isn't it? On the one hand, handhelds have gone from dumb phones to the Droid and iPhone platforms; on the other, well, people wrote playable games for the Atari 2600.