“Just like Sun’s Java, QuickTime threatened Microsoft’s Windows monopoly by offering a way for developers to build code that was not dependent upon Microsoft,” Daniel Eran writes for RoughlyDrafted.
Eran writes, “However, the real interest in swallowing QuickTime wasn’t so Microsoft could provide its own set of media content tools. Microsoft didn’t even see ‘content authoring’ as a market worth entering; it had other plans in mind… At the time, it appeared that the real money in media was going to be made from Internet streaming and playback, not in content authoring, which still belonged to Apple.”
In 1997, “Microsoft hoped to use its Office monopoly leverage against Apple to not only smash the cross-platform threat of Netscape Navigator and Sun’s Java, but also to kill Apple’s QuickTime,” Eran writes. “Prior to the July 1997 agreement, Microsoft’s Christopher Phillips famously told QuickTime manager Peter Hoddie, ‘we want you to knife the baby.’ Apple refused, and QuickTime survived the Mac Office and patent licensing deal intact. That was not the end of Microsoft’s assault on QuickTime however, but rather only the beginning.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz,” “Formica,” and “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]