“Microsoft’s desperate efforts to stamp out QuickTime helped to line up a series of events that positioned a deadly weapon and pulled its trigger. The problem for Microsoft was that it had mistakenly aimed the gun at its own weak spot; the bullet has been tearing through layers of Microsoft ever since,” Daniel Eran writes for RoughlyDrafted.
Eran covers the history of efforts from Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, and many others in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” and “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
Related article:
How Microsoft tried (and failed) to kill Apple’s QuickTime – March 13, 2007
This is actually a very important story and deserves wider recognition. Eran should write a book.
Of course I wish MDN had posted Sunday’s Roughly Drafted story: Mac Office, $150 Million, and the Story Nobody Covered. Again no one is covering the true payment Microsogt made to Apple in 1997.
And yes I sent the link in.
Great article! M$ does drive inovation… just not in their own company.
Eran won’t write a book, because it wouldn’t sell as evidenced by his not attempting what you suggest. Blogs are free. Besides, pompous, monotonous, and obsessive texts only appeal to insecure and neurotic types anyhow.
Hey, “@Freddie” . . . insecure much?
Screw!
@@Freddie…..monitoring the web for new links to RDM eh?
Please excuse me if I tell you you are a little shit. Now go back into your Microsoft worm infested swamp. Please.
I bet Daniel Eran WILL one day turn this material into a book. And my business for one will circulate a few copies at Christmas time!
Microsoft got cocky and have been for the last 5 years and now they’re paying the price.
From a consumer’s point of view, that was the best investment ever. I bet that Bill Gate’s fumes knowing that this infusion of cash helped revive Apple and his spending billions on Microsoft has yielded nothing but failure and frustration.
How does it feel knowing that every Apple product you buy has little bit of Microsoft inside?
In the real world of corporate information technology — help desks
and IT departments in business offices across our beloved America,
Windows, Office, and Microsoft are the only tools we need.
American workers, information workers, knowledge workors of the
new global economy only need Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and
Powerpoint to be productive, competitive, and employed.
Killing Apple, Knifing the Baby, and Killing Quicktime would have
been the best favors Microsoft could have done to America to
enhance the productivity of the American economy and of American
emerging information workforce.
Apple, Macs, Quicktime, and all those non-Microsoft technologies
are not enterprise tools and do not enhance the productivity of
American Office workers. Only Microsoft can help America stay on
the cutting age of corporate information technology. All we need is:
Windows Vista and Microsoft Office on every desktop;
Windows Servers and Outlook and Exchange mail servers:
and now, Microsoft High Performance Computing, Clusters,
and Grid technologies to unleash the power of the millions
of computers sitting under desks in cublicles across this
great land — that gives meaning to the words freedom and
democracy.
Microsoft will again win over Apple’s XGrid and attempts at
clusters and high performing computing.
America’s economic supremacy depends on Microsoft and
only Microsoft can keep America productive and competitive.
Enough of Roughly Drafted and other Mac users criticizing
and complaining about Microsoft. We should be thankful
that we have Microsoft to lead business IT in the U.S.A.
Microsoft’s history of tough tactics used to gain its top spot
in the world of IT were necessary and an important lesson on
how business is done. Like making sausage it’s not pretty,
but the results are fantastic. That’s how the oil industry gre
in this country, that’s how all great industries developed in
our free enterprise economic system, and that is why Bill Gates
had the vision and the courage to produce a true world-class
software company we can all buy their products and be proud
that it was made in the U.S.A. and represents America’s true
values. What is good for Microsoft is good for America.
Actually, Freddy is correct. Eran is pompous, neurotic, and often-time truth-challenged. He’s been called to the mat many times for his distortions, and to top it off, he becomes absolutely unhinged on political issues — often in the middle of whatever point he’s trying to make. That doesn’t bode well for his sanity. I think the guy’s heading for a breakdown.
@ Real Business
Oh geez…what kind of nonsensical drivel was that? For your sake I hope it was satirical.
@ Real Business World Information Technology,
Enough jingoistic flag waving already. Some of us don’t want to work in a battleship grey, rank and file cube culture. Some of us ‘think different’.
Choice is the name of the game. Same as it ever was. And if given a real choice, we choose quality solutions (Mac) every time.
If you choose another ‘solution’, fine, “go ahead on”. Hell ain’t half full, brother.
Oh yeah, and God bless America too!
And what is good for America is good for Microsoft.
Every time I boot up my Mac, plug in my iPod, or run aQuickTime video I thank Microsoft for saving Apple from total annihilation.
You know, I hear that deep in the bowels of Cupertino there is a shrine where a gilded replica of the “Glorious Microsoft Check” is worshipped and the methane from a thousand Apple toilets provide the fuel for the eternal flame that burns in constant memory of “Bill Gates, Savior of Apple”. Of course, only the High Priests of Apple are permitted access to the “Holy of Holies”. So says Eran, acolyte to the shrine.
Nothing surprising in the article, except the sheer depth of Microsoft incompetency.
um, From: Real Business World Information Technology,
I hate to burst your bubble but a lot of us in the real world, you know, them other bits outside the U.S., actualy want America to fall. Fsck your economy, let’s have some fun.
Apple, bring the noise.
“and the methane from a thousand Apple toilets provide the fuel for the eternal flame that burns in constant memory of “Bill Gates, Savior of Apple”.”
Now that was some funny stuff!
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It’s a damn poor atom blaster that can’t point both directions.
MicroSh_t wasn’t saving Apple with the (unreported) payoff, they were paying for theft of code. And if the way MS does business is a shining example of how business is and should be conducted, we are all heading down the drain. And, I’m still rolling on the floor from that MS =Productivity for America. If I were the head of a large corporation I’d fire the entire IT staff for being so “in bed” with MS and their gangster mentality.
Oh, BTW, RBWIT is a jerk.
“I hate to burst your bubble but a lot of us in the real world, you know, them other bits outside the U.S., actualy want America to fall. Fsck your economy, let’s have some fun.”
You are an idiot. You don’t think your country’s economy would suffer if America went down? You better hope you don’t get what you wish for or you might be digging in trash cans in your lovely native country.
I’m no American jingoist, but your statement was just freaking stoopid.
The problem with trouble shooting is, real trouble shoots back!
According the Eran the Errant, the Paranoid Purveyor of the Evils of the Microsoft Boogieman:
“In July of 1997, the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft appeared to vanish with the announcement a new cooperative partnership that included:
a cross licensing agreement
a five year deal for continued development of Office for the Mac platform
the designation of Internet Explorer as the default Mac web browser
a small but symbolic $150 million investment by Microsoft in Apple”
Note that according to Eran Microsoft’s plan to demolish Apple included a cooperative partnership and a $150 millions dollar infusion into Apple’s coffers.
and there’s more…
“Microsoft was certainly well aware of how much money it was making in each product category. It would be foolish for the company to cancel Mac Office, simply because it made too much money from it.”
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/592FE887-5CA1-4F30-BD62-407362B533B9.html
Really, Eran, do you really belief everything that you write? Actual email from Bill Gates tells a much different story. Let me refresh your selective memory by referencing another article posted by MDN.
“Documentary evidence that Microsoft considered abandoning Office for Mac in order to cause “a great deal of harm” to Apple has emerged. An emailed memo from Microsoft-founder Bill Gates to then Mac Business Unit chief Ben Waldman dated June 1997 talks about morale in the Mac Office development camp. At that time Microsoft’s senior management were considering dumping Mac support. The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time.”
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/bill_gates_confidential_email_mac_office_users_were_microsoft_guinea_pigs/
Microsoft’s own documents highlight the fact that Microsoft was not making gobs of money from Office, contrary to Eran’s psychotic imaginations.
If Eran, who claims knowledge and insight that only he knows and understands, is a bald-faced liar and manipulator, why believe anything that he writes? Well, Eran sycophants, what do you say now about your fabulous fabricator of fallacious feces foisted as facts?
Of course Eran’s Roughly Drafted is wrong, untrue and misleading.
He is a Mac user ! ! !
Honest people use Windows.
People with the intellectual honesty to accept that Windows is better,
has a lower cost of ownership, runs on less expensive hardware, and
delivers an overall better user experience — especially for office workers —
also have the intellectual honesty to speak the truth about the history of
Microsoft and its lesser rival Apple Inc.
Roughly Drafted advocates the use of Apple’s MAcintosh computers.
Who could expect to read truthful things from a site like Roughly Drafted?
Ean is a lier, or at least — like most Mac users — ignorant and wrong.
… and like most PC users doesn’t know how to use a spell checker, I suppose. Anyhow, I won’t take the bait, moron. It just proves that idiots exist in both Apple and Microsoft neighborhoods.
Assclowns,
It’s Daniel Eran. Ya know — like Billy Bob, or Pamela Sue, or Jo Beth.
–
Busting-TSOI,
Frequently you write some quite interesting comments.
But, I find it uncomfortable [read: like a wet fart] that you’ll dismiss ALL of Daniel’s revelations regarding MS based on your own political FEELINGS. He’s revealing the facts about MS, and you bitch about politics because you can’t control your HATRED for the ‘Left Wing Loonies’.
I’m asking you to stop that.