Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Moves in on the Graphics Market
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft has quietly been building up graphics-related R&D, reports Computerworld, noting that Microsoft employees will be presenting one out of every eight papers at SIGGRAPH 2007. And it's not a fluke — other recent Microsoft graphics-related developments include Photosynth, which has been discussed on Slashdot several times, as well as the Silverlight/Expression Studio graphics suite, which will compete with Adobe's Flash/Illustrator/Lightroom/Dreamweaver offerings. At SIGGRAPH, Microsoft will supposedly have demos of some new software including image deblurring tools and Soft Scissors, which 'solves the vexing problem of how to cut and paste an image from one background to another if the image's edges — hair blowing in the wind, blades of grass — are very complex.' Microsoft's competitors aren't sitting down. Adobe's CEO, calling Microsoft a '$50 billion monopolist,' has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems, and Google has also been building up its own graphics-related software products, such as the 3D modeling tool SketchUp, and Google Earth."
Looks like a great tool to me:
http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/softscissors/
Its not only DirectX, MS was involved with OpenGL years ago as well until the OpenGL group didn't want to target 3D hardware for gaming.
MS also has put a lot of money in research in the area of Graphics, from photo recognition to camera input device concepts, etc.
There is also the entire XBox division which has now spent years understanding graphics, rendering, and has even been instrumental in shaping the design of GPUs in NVidia and ATI cards.
XBox technology is also at the heart of the new Vista graphics subsystem. Adding features that make up DX10 and WDDM, all the way from unified Shaders to GPU RAM virtualization to OS level GPU pre-emption and physics/math support on GPUs through a standard API.
I think Dreamweaver may have officially jumped the shark with the Adobe acquisition. The damn install put 800 MEG of adobe bloat, a new bonjour service, and a licensing service onto my system before it laid down a single Dreamweaver directory.
.net 2.0, but Dreamweaver as done nothing but go backwards.
And starting Dreamweaver revealed a program (unlike the CS3 suite) that looked suspiciously (almost exactly like) Dreamweaver 8. It had a new tab for Adobe's Ajax framework and it might have some new support for cold fusion which I don't need.
It can no longer be said that Dreamweaver is kick-ass, open platform, in a lightweight package. It may even be bigger than Expression!!!!!! And MS has been learning from Dreamweaver. Expression only targets
"Adobe's CEO, calling Microsoft a '$50 billion monopolist,' has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems..."
That Adobe "monopolist" quote is 4 months old. Did that quote really need to be dragged out again for this story?
(BTW, Adobe has some nerve calling someone else a "monopolist" when Adobe tried to collude with MS in price fixing to protect its own Office to PDF export monopoly (Adobe proposed that MS could include PDF export functionality in Office 2k7 if MS up'ed the price so as not to undercut Adobe's Office PDF-export tools.))
And Silverlight is already working on Macs, so the question of Silverlight being "compatilble with non-Windows operating systems" is more 4-month old FUD.
The submitter should've just gone with the story at hand, not dig up a 4-month old story about Adobe's fears of competing with Silverlight.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I have more faith in MS and Silverlight on cross platform than I do Flash
Come on. You can't seriously believe Silverlight will continue to be cross-platform, after Microsoft has a large enough installed base.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.