“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.]
Bob –
Your world-view is such a beautiful fantasyland. Can I come and visit some time???
FYI – Iraq didn’t attack us on 9/11. Our painful escapade there has NOT made us one bit safer here at home, and has become the greatest recruiting tool for Islamic fundamentalism.
Bob,
You are a saint. We are the silent majority. Don’t listen to these poor left wing souls. The US has saved millions and millions of lives by getting involved. God Bless the USA!
To @gzero,
“… to boost the flagging morale of hopelessly biased and pathetically insecure Mac users.” YEP you are totally objective mr. MS paid fanboy.
You might ask how I know you are a paid MS fanboy? Well its this comment: “I find RoughlyDrafted extremely tiresome, uninformative, and worthless use of bandwidth.” Either your paid or you spend all your valuable time going to “extremely tiresome, uninformative, and worthless” web sites.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> LOL
LIke someone, hate someone, but to spend all your time reading someone you hate is, well, er, pointless!!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> JMHO
N.
I thought ‘Kill the Baby’ was a Milton-Bradley game.
Wait-
I was thinking of the Machete Frisbee by Wham-O.
My/dum
Back on topic, folks – any political haggling needs to go find a home somewhere else, please. This is not the Fox News vs. CNN site.
This is but one bony knuckle on the many skeletons hiding in the M$ closet that is now slowly being probed and searched and being brought out into the open.
I’ve been a Mac use for over 14 years. What I detest more than Windows apologists are the sniveling, whimpering, worried, and pathetic losers like you. You haven’t the mettle to stick with Apple unless some pompous ninny like Eran props up your languid limpness with a hefty dose of concocted idiocy. How do you feel now, moron?
digerati:
I agree – the ‘knife the baby’ story was really shocking at the time and showed a level of back-room manipulation that we were unaware of. We all know corporations are self-serving, but this was mafia-like tactics and language.
It make me wonder what technologies MS has been successful in destroying in Apple and other back rooms.
Good grief, why would anyone compare Paul Thurrott with anyone who actually knows anything at all worth knowing–or who is actually concerned to tell the truth.
What does Thurrott know beyond what button is where in some Windows interface? Nothing of any importance.
Thurrott posted on his site that Microsoft’s deal with Apple over Office for Mac and over the non-voting shares was because Microsoft were “compassionate”. What a jerk! What a liar!
Microsoft were never going to kill Office for Mac, because it makes them too much money–and because it’s been a way of spreading their format monopoly wider so that other office suites don’t get a foothold. If you read the critical email Gates only asked his tools how far along the program was and whether its near-completion could be hidden from Apple. That was so that he could use the threat of killing Office to press Apple to take IE (in order to damage both Netscape and Sun) and to drop patent lawsuits and a lawsuit over the stolen QuickTime code.
Compassion! From Gates! You’d get more compassion from a rattlesnake.
All the documentary evidence, including Microsoft’s own internal emails, contradicts Thurrott. And even he can’t be stupid enough to believe what he’s saying. But he evidently thinks his readers are–and that they’re too lazy to research the matter and look at the documents. Thurrott: a professional liar in Redmond’s interest.
@ n. e. says
I’ve been a Mac use for over 14 years…
LIAR.
Why do people always preface their insults with mac experience? Whenever I see this I know what follows are lies.
Good article Daniel. Thanks for the links and the entertaining perspective.
“No offense to the writer, but if these options exist, then Microsoft didn’t have a monopoly.”
Sorry, it doesn’t require anywhere near 100% market control for a company to be able to exercise an abusive monopoly. Sorry that greek and english don’t cross-translate exactly.
You need a reader heads up for content from Roughly drafted??? there is a widget for the RSS you know!!
Irrationality appears to be the single most common characteristic of Eran’s band of sycophantic followers. You can believe that I am not a Mac user for over 14 years, but that does not change that fact that I am. I think that your fascination for the illogical and the prejudicial confirms my previous thread that many who read RoughlyDrafted haven’t a reasonable grasp of reality.
I choose Apple because I compared and contrasted Apple and Microsoft on the bases of security, functionality, and elegance. Eran disparages Microsoft as if it was his life’s mission to justify his using a Mac. Well, any PC apologist can do the same on a Dell with XP and many do. So what’s the difference between a frustrated Windows apologist and Eran? Not much. I find Eran’s and his enthusiasts obsessions with Microsoft neurotic and a complete waste of time. Sure, I’ll laugh at Microsoft’s mistakes, I just don’t preoccupy myself with Microsoft like many of you do.
BustingTheSkullsOfIdiots
sounds like ‘Im not a racist however…. blah blah blah’
I don’t read RoughlyDrafted, you moron, once was enough. That’s my point.
@ G4Dualie throws this out into the void:
“LIAR.
Why do people always preface their insults with mac experience? Whenever I see this I know what follows are lies.”
PC users have just discovered a new way to have fun ripping up Mac forums, and stupid mac freaks fall for it every time! It’s quite entertaining watching macaholics foam at the mouth! ROTFLMFAO!
Here fishy, fishy, fishy………..
In the real world of IT in corporate America we welcome Microsoft
with open arms — we welcome its strong arm tactics because those
are the qualities that make America competitive and strong.
How else are we going to win the global economic race against
the smart and hard working scientists of Asia and Europe?
I wish there were 500 hungry and brutal microsofts in the S&P 500
and in the DOW and in Nasdaq for us to invest in the futire of corporate
America — the future of the world, crushed and eaten for lunch by our
Bill Gates and billionaire Ballmers on team America.
Go ahead. Knife the baby — who cares. We have Office and all
the other wonderful Microsoft technologies that make America
strong, competitive and feared.
Microsoft should be rewarded for showing us the way to business
success in the global economy. American corporations should
use microsoft products and only microsoft products — together
MSFT and the political-industrial, oil and defense establishments
will make the 21 century the American century, all over again.
There’s a plethora of Microsoft-obsessed morons at MDN today. you know, this obsession with Microsoft has softened your minds. I’m embarrassed to consider you Mac users. Oh, well, it’s a free country.
Bob: “TenaciousDNA;
I understand you. If you’re not whitebread, living in the USA or supporting your rather limited world-view, you’re somehow “evil”. Yep, them middle Easterners should just be let alone to kill themselves off, ‘cuz that’s what they’ve been a-doin’ for a thousand years, right?
I know, you can’t acept the facts at hand, that being that faulty data from half the western worlds intelligence agencies contributed to the invasion of Iraq, because that’ll somehow get in the way of your irrational hatred of one man, but the fact is, somehow, somewhere and in some way, intervention was required.
Hussein caused the deaths, through years of wars and invasions, of more than 6 million people.
Hussein caused the deaths, through years of persecution, including the gassing of entire villages, of thousands of his own citizens.
The fact is, that through our interventions in the Middle East, we’ve prevented a repeat of the murders of 2,752 civilians right here at home.
One last “fact”… our military is an all volunteer force, and many of US that volunteered, and served, find your intolerance to be utterly disgusting.
-Bob
Bob,
I’m sorry. You didn’t understand me. My comment was in response to the “one Al Gore is enough” comment from a previous post. The point of my comment was to bring to light that politicians will use information–spun or otherwise–to push their individual policies and agendas. It was also meant to emphasize that if one politician should be examined for these practices, then they ALL should. I may have been heavy-handed by throwing out an example that is such a lightning rod, but the point is still valid.
Your anti-military comment disturbs me the most out of all of them. You’re just plain wrong in your assumtion. For some reason there is a strong “with us or against us” stance in our great country that is creating a rift that does not need to be here. AMERICANS DO SUPPORT THEIR TROOPS. It’s ridiculous to assume otherwise. Please don’t correlate disagreements with political policies leading up to and during the war with peoples’ feelings for the Military. There are no people that I hold in higher regard than ALL-past and present-members of all five military branches. Being willing to lay one’s life on the line to protect our country and improve the world is the bravest, most selfless and honorable thing a person could do.
We’re actually in agreement on almost everything. We’re just looking at it from different angles.
[olive branch]
Interesting article. I was aware that Microsoft had been caught red-handed stealing Quicktime code, but I didn’t know how they’d gotten their hands on it before this.
Back in 1998, Steve Jobs had a choice to mak: he could take the fuckers to court for a couple hundred million in damages (after about a decade of MS pulling every stalling tactic in the book), by which time Apple would be long gone, or he could give BG and Monkey-boy a walk on the felony copyright infringement they were obviously guilty of, and make sure that Microsoft continued to ship their industry-standard bloatware on the Mac.
Just keep this in mind whenever you see a Microsoft rep bitching about software piracy.
-jcr
Quad Core writes: “No offense to the writer, but if these options exist, then Microsoft didn’t have a monopoly.”
False. Monopoly does not mean no competition. Rather it is based on ability to control the market and by market share. When AT&T and Standard Oil were broken up due to monopolistic practices, it was not because there was no competition.
Eran has a way of presenting both the facts and the context – of connecting the dots, if you will. I’m one of those who followed the Justice vs. Microsoft trial, who perused the trial findings of Judge Jackson, and who was anxious to see the case of Caldera vs. Microsoft present the facts in open court. (It was settled just weeks before trial.) I’d never grasped the full story of Microsoft’s war against QuickTime until now. It just goes to demonstrate what a loathsome outfit Microsoft has been all along.
@ G4 Dualie
“Sure, I’ll laugh at Microsoft’s mistakes, I just don’t preoccupy myself with Microsoft like many of you do.”
No one here is laughing at Microsoft’s mistakes! That puts you in a class all by yourself.
We’re laughing because we’re indulging a long-suppressed notion that our computer and its maker is finally coming unto its own after being treated like a second-rate, second-class citizen for years.
Even through the lean, shameful years, when our own advocacy fell on deaf leaderless ears, Apple finally averted disaster and righted the ship. But not without help from many different sectors in the tech community, the least of which being Microsoft, who, as it was revealed in the court transcripts provided in Eran’s piece, was behaving pathetically dishonest, once again.
So you see, we’re not laughing at Microsoft’s mistakes, we’re laughing because we realize we backed a winner and the world is starting to take notice. We’re not obsessed with Microsoft, we’re obsessed with Macintosh! There is a difference and we take care of our own.
While Daniel comes across as insulting and abusive and many of us could do without the invective, you cannot overlook the fact that his pieces evolve from solid references. Sure he spins the truth and what good writer doesn’t take dramatic license with the truth? It’s his manner and style of engaging his audience and for a few minutes out of our day, we enjoy the entertainment and then we go back to doing what we were doing before he turned our heads. WTF?
When you live in a land of giants, it’s important to know where they stand, at all times.
Surrrre, rrrright. Every time you mention Microsoft, you tacitly admit your undying obsession with the company from Redmond. If you judge Apple simply by comparing Apple to Microsoft, you really don’t grasp why it is that Apple is succeeding as well as it is. Success is not defined as being just better than the worst.
Tell me, when you “compliment” your girlfriend do you always contrast her to someone else? Or, when giving an opinion on a meal do you say, “Wow, this sure takes better than eating that shit sandwich.”
Here’s more for you to ponder.
Take the two worst teams in any sport and place match them. Would you consider the winner of the match successful even if their record were 2 and 98 and their opponent’s record were 1 and 99? According to your logic, the winner would be twice a good as the loser (i.e. is successful).
How would you compare the winner of the aforementioned match to a team with a record of 100 and 0 and a RPI of 0.95? Apparently, you seem to think that Apple’s success is measured by the failures of Microsoft. I guess that makes you a loser, too.