Microsoft is big. It was once a small company. And the times were, it could make it through to the top. And we can't say MS did it becuase it had no competitors. MS pushed the technology forward and made it's way to glory.

Personally I think Microsoft employs best technology specialists, and even Google or Apple can't compare with MS in a level of software development tools and approaches maturity.

But, money are not made when we do software development. An ISV makes money after a client finds their solution, most likely downloads a trial, "gets hooked" and buys the product.

 And this is exactly where with Microsoft it gets tricky  

It used to be, that a developer firm had to aquire a code signing certificate from an authorized certificate entity, and whenever a software piece, signed with that certificate, was being downloaded by the client, no browser or antivirus warning would appear. Even better, IE used to tell you that these guys are good, since they sign their programs, so that you are 100% sure the program you have downloaded hasn't been altered by some hacker on the way from the developer build to your computer.

With Internet Explorer 9, everything has changed. A new "security" feature was introduced as a part of a SmartScreen filter. The essence of it is: whenever you download a software distributive (an installation packege), even if the code is signed and appears to be absolutely genuine, but isn't being downloaded widely on the world scale, you are given almost no way to run it. IE will tell you, that not very many people are downloading this program, so you shouldn't either.

For the truth's sake I should mention, that the file on the screen shot (that I have borrowed from a google's blog post) is showing a dialog for a non-signed installer, but the same rules apply for code-signed executables.

Jews are smart. Correct. But we can't just call what really is a JewFilter a SmartFilter. Those are different types of smart. 

Good thing is that IE9 is slowly fading away, being out-bettered by other vendor's browsers (perosnally I use Chrome due to it's performance).

In this special way Microsoft is "closing the gates" of "heavan" in front of a start-up software development firms. I am sure, that this is more of an attempt to provide better security, but hey, we had a code-signing for a long time for this.

MS really "MSed"-up on this one. Hope IE 10 will be more start-up firendly.