And from now on, we will own your keywords

[Taavi Burns]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 03:18:16PM -0500, Noah John Gellner wrote:
> This recent news raises two main points for me:
> 1) Microsoft has been most effective at limiting the openness of
> computing and thereby potential for challengers by way of replacing open
> standards with Microsoft's proprietary formats. This seems pretty
> evident today but I remember an article in Open computing over 10 years
> ago which considered the NT approach to the server market as novel.

But that's novel from a marketing angle.  The technology was old even then.

> 2) It would seem to be in the best interests of Microsoft's competitors
> to ensure that their products worked with Linux/BSD systems since this
> would do most to undermine the main strength of Microsoft's competitive
> advantage. I think that one of the biggest challenges facing Linux as a
> desktop platform is getting things like Quicktime, Real media, Yahoo
> messenger, etc. to work. I know that it can be done, but it is

To their credit, Yahoo is actually entirely on the forefront of that matter:
http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/download/unix.html

RealMedia seems to work well enough last time I installed it (I generally
choose to avoid it though, on ALL platforms, as I find it clunky).

Real native Quicktime support is a real sore spot, though.  That and the
fact that iTunes absoulutely refuses to run under WINE (at least it did
last I checked online a couple of months ago).

> non-trivial and typically uneven in quality. However, there seems to be
> little enthusiasm in this direction on behalf of the parties which would
> seem to directly benefit the most. Strange.

Well, targetting 5-odd Linux platforms with even quality is quite honestly
a pretty big order.

If they came out with very nice packages for at least two major distros,
though, it shouldn't be too hard for the others to make use of (ports
trees are wondeful that way).

-- 
taa

   The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we
   live.  Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have
   guided missiles and misguided men.
      -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)
/*eof*/
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