2) Apple has been slowly firing salvos across Microsoft’s bow for a long time (Quicktime, iTunes, iWork, Safari, etc) This is the first true response by Microsoft and will most likely not be the last. Apple has been running around fat and happy for the past few years. Well, the Microsoft giant is waking up and he doesn’t look happy. Apple will either need to stop aggravating Microsoft or move very ,very fast to stay ahead of the competition. iTunes/iPod is good head start; I’m justnot sure it is enough.

I wish MS would update the whole app and deploy it so I could play all the content I have to deal w/ on the web and from friends. Apple just didn’t seem to get the point about getting QuickTime installed on everything quicktime.

You can’t underestimate the appeal of M$ w/ playsforsure or whatever that stuff will be. WMP can be decent and a rewrite for 11 on vista/xp will be a pretty decent app. The pure volume of available things (mostly crap) means that there will still be some cool features that itunes doesn’t have and if it works then what’s the problem? The only gotcha is for the people with pcs and macs, otherwise their content works fine on their fake ipods and on their pcs. They can even have both.

So dance the happy stupid dance while a switcher compatibility app disappears. Ok..not getting the glee besides just anti-M$

Now as for the office being discontinued…ok like whatever, they make 1/3rd of their money from it and it costs a hell of a lot more than one or two digital downloads of the latest song. 5 years is enough to have a leopard 64 bit supported native version and there will always be pressure.

Too bad this dual boot intel mac will only boot vista and show a much better version of windows than what’s out there today. It would be nice to compare Tiger to XP.

But keep droning with that single trackpad button…I love Apple products, but I’m not gonna be suckered into hating something when it’s needed.

As soon as I get home, I’m installing the Flip4Mac QT driver on all my machines and trashing WMP. Can’t wait.

Besides, if the VMWare/virtualization alternatives that allow Windows apps to run on the new macs pan out, none of this will matter…

D

Agreed. They will continue to produce Office because–let’s face it–they make good money from Office. I don’t see how the author jumps from “We’re cutting Windows Media Player” to “We’re dropping out of the consumer market.”

What Microsoft is arguably doing is dropping out of the “Free software” market, since both WMP and Internet Explorer were free downloads.

The other thing to remember is that, contrary to popular belief, the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft is not responsible for all Microsoft software on the Mac. I wouldn’t be surprised if WMP was not produced by the Mac Business Unit (considering how god-awful it is).

Frankly, spinning it off to another company is a good thing. Flip4Mac has some real incentive to create a great codec because they’re making money off the content producers who use Macs (and there are plenty more of them on Macs than Windows).

Flip4Mac can also do it “right” without having to worry about internal Microsoft politics. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to play copy-protected WMP music inside iTunes.

Microsoft has the incentive to work with Flip4Mac for the same reasons that they had the incentive to do it themselves–more eyeballs means more support for the technology. However, Microsoft doesn’t necessarily have to invest in the headcount of Mac developers to make it happen.

And don’t let the door hit yer assets on the way out.

Microsoft – growing old gracefully and handing the reigns to Apple.

Apple – to rule the world.

As for Microsoft refusing to sell a student/teacher version of Mac Office, that’s really a stretch. It’s one thing not to waste resources on consumer products for which Apple already bundles superior competitors for free. It’s quite another to kill a version of software they’re committed to maintaining. Not much would be gained by killing the student/teacher addition, other than bad publicity.

My best guess is that Microsoft is slowly trying to change gears. They understand that selling software will eventually be a dead-end (how many Office upgrades can they sell?) and that the future is in controlling formats and selling services. Flip4Mac enables Microsoft’s Windows Media formats to play on the Mac, thus increasing those formats’ market.

option…

i do think this year will be the drm war’s close and i think it’s going to be a massive bang

my money is on apple

Their efforts to prop up the ever struggling Windows franchize will end up excluding them from the home and entertainment market, with Apple taking the cake. Microsoft will only be left with the business world, unless Apple begins to move that direction or you can run MS apps on OS X natively or through universal binaries.

MDN Magic Word — “Sales”

If you are a developer, are you going to put out a product (or design a web site for a client) that can’t be addressed by a significant percentage of potential customers. How can anyone justify that on a business level, when there are other tools out there like Quicktime, Real, or Flash that are cross platform.

Personally, I think this is a dumba** move on MS’s part. You can already see the grip of their proprietary standards loosening if you look at web statistics on a month-month basis. IE keeps losing share.

Personally, I think the U.S. Antitrust regulators are pussies and they should have broken Microsoft into three, preferably four companies. Microsoft don’t appear to have learnt the lesson the original Antitrust cases were there to teach. They are STILL behaving so badly it makes me sick!

I believe innovation comes through competition and Microsoft has such a large capitalisation that good ideas can’t filter through to those who write the code. I’ve been saying for at least five years that there would be web/office convergence.

Now Apple has Intel processors it’s one less “perception” barrier too overcome. Seeing what Apple can do in iWeb I wish they would develop a professional web design package. Think how good that would be? It would eat Dreamweaver in a second!

Windows Media Player was god awful in the Mac. Office is the critical app and it will continue for another 5 years.

WMP wasn’t making MS any money and MS knows that they can’t compete with Quicktime in the OSX platform.

they realise apple will OWN the consumer space and they will be left with the business lot

they’ve given up

just wait until we see leopard vs the joke they dredge up

The fact that MS would publicly promise support for the Mac and promptly begin to withdraw support is just SOP for MS when they want to make sure a competitor remembers who’s in charge of the market place.

I personally want to see WMP go away. I think that QT has always been ready to be the default media player for all PC platforms – and now more than ever. Of course MS will never let this happen, period.

In attitude I’ve tried to be friendly toward WMP just because it gives me some common ground with Windows heads, but the truth is, its such a closed and rudimentary desktop media player that I view it as just being a toy and pretty much non-threatening to QT in a serious way.

You are on the mark about the battle over the living room, IMHO.

This is about the battle over the living room. Apple has stepped on Microsoft’s toes with the success of iPod/iTunes/Quicktime. Microsoft is using whatever clout they have to “force” the masses to stay with Microsoft due to WMP. The are just drawing a line in the sand.

BTW, don’t believe that Microsoft is going to stop supporting Office for Mac; they make too much money from it. WMP was free.

MW: “makes” as in Makes sense to me.

MDN Magic Word: “Using” as in “I’m not using Microsoft products”

hmm pullling back on MSN Messenger? Who fuckin cares

Oh wait.. that’s part of office..

pulling back on WMP?

That kinda sucks, but the format’s not hugely important anyway.. It’s baffling that MS would think Apple’s not a platform they want to support for digital media

However, working in the post production side of a multimedia organization I can tell you that, the fact that we have WMP for Mac (as little a thing as that seems), is what keeps us ever so slowly but surely getting more people, in graphics and editing, onboard with Macs in our organization. I don’t mean that WMP does this single handedly, but it, along with other seemingly benign cross-platform thingys really does help.

More and more the howling of the IT people (basically they’re all MS priests), in the halls of our institution are being quieted. We have one IT person that actually offers to help the Mac users in our building now. This was a huge leap for our company.

By the way, I thought that the word processor in iWork is able to share documents directly with MS Word – You mean it can’t?

Chicken little, much?

MS may be on thin ice but they are still providing what matters — Office and MSN support.

mw “corner” as in microshaft is in a corner.

They better watch their step or they will implode.