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."
but I can't feel any sympathy for Adobe, who is increasingly monopolising the design arena with their obscenely priced tools. Competition is good, no matter what your opinion on Microsoft is - someone needs to take on rapidly enlarging 500lb gorilla that is Adobe, particularly since they took over Macromedia.
Is that what I'll need to input in order to access the graphics-related functionality in Google Earth?
"Adobe's CEO ... has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems"
Because I've neeever had problems with Flash on my Linux machine...
Silverlight has been cross-platform since launch. The Adobe CEO questioned whether this would persist. Microsoft didn't invest on porting a subset of the
What, specifically, is Bruce Chizen's plan to support non-Microsoft OS's?
Don't bitch about how the bad monopoly is being mean to you when you aren't doing anything much to help the nascent competition.
Paying one programmer to port and support your apps on other platforms does more than all the public whining about how Microsoft is being mean.
Looks like a great tool to me:
http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/softscissors/
But isn't Microsoft the developer of Direct3D, which is now a premiere graphics API for anything Windows? Yes, OpenGL still is extremely important, but I just don't see why it's a surprise that Microsoft has so many researchers contributing to the field of computer graphics when they develop one of the two biggest graphics platforms in the world.
In other related news today:
1 -46.html
Microsoft Nurtures Linux Silverlight Port
http://www.sdtimes.com/article/LatestNews-2007080
I have more faith in MS and Silverlight on cross platform than I do Flash anymore after the past few years. Not only is Silverlight already available on other platforms it even supports 64bit (gasp).
And this is just the Silverlight 1.0 RC and MS doesn't expect long range use or adoption until 1.1 is finalized as it adds in massive amounts of support for web interaction and more language support. (1.1 is already in developer circles, and will be out not long after 1.0)
Also for people worried about adoption, take a look at MLB.com. There are a lot things in Silverlight especially on the programming side that Flash just can't do easily. Silverlight not only builds on Vista XAML technology for the web but also does HD quality video and can also do single feed streaming unlike Flash.
If I were Adobe, I would start to push Linux products out of the door like crazy.
Is it right? Not?
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
Software application companies only develop for Windows, help MS keep their OS monopoly up, and then cry when MS decides to take those app companies' market too. They enabled it with their short sightedness.
It is many of these companies that, through the release of countless windows programs, many exclusively for windows, that have helped microsoft get to where they are today.
Did they really believe that microsoft wouldn't move in on their territory sooner or later?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
That way, everyone now has a load of windows-only stuff that they're stuck with.
This is one of the reasons I think Mono is a bad idea. All Microsoft has to do is be friendly to Mono, until everyone drops their guard and decides it's okay to develop in dotNET. Then, all they need to do is start enforcing their patents, and it's all over...
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
"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
you could make flash files with notepad or your IDE of choice using the flex 2 compiler which is free.
Image editing? Photoshop. Sure there's GIMP, but frankly, GIMP sucks and has no value outside of RGB colour space. There are a few other apps, (Painter, Corel, etc.) but the POINT is: pros use Photoshop because it is the best. Period.
Bezier Curve? Illustrator. There used to be a better app, Freehand, but it died in the Macromedia acquisition.
Page Layout? Sure, there's Quark, but everyone HATES Quark, and InDesign does the job. So, that's not a monopoly, yet...
Web Design? Dreamweaver. nuff said.
Web based animation? Flash.
Adobe completely dominates the graphic design industry, and for Adobe to make noises about MS being some kind of a monopoly is simply ludicrous.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Free" Market. I understand. I also actually read Adam Smith, who placed several caveats on his theory that make it an unattainable ideal. Holding primacy among these is the availability of perfect information. (And the unspoken addendum that the volume of perfect information must be evaluable (i.e. instantly having perfect information from the correct context.))
r e_about/a_modest_man_named_smith/
What we have today is, at best, mercantilism. The biggest thing you ignore in your assertion are "barriers to entry", which as any silicon valley executive can tell you are impenetrable when Microsoft is in the market. A startup's best chance for profit in a Microsoft market is for MS to buy them out. This happened lots in the 80's ad 90's, with most of those companies' products and innovations heading straight for the MS dustbin. So, your assertion about others filling the void to keep MS on their toes is wishful thinking. I'm not defending the current occupants of the market: their business models are antiquated and inefficient.
A cash cow by whose standards?
going by market capitalization (a flawed metric, but something.) Adobe who are the market leader in this space are at $23,978.8 Million. Microsoft are at $271,139.2 Million. That's over an order of magnitude in business size. The graphics market at a discount (in order to kill Adobe) from Adobe's pricing is quite small in relative terms. Add to that the trend towards freeish software led by Google and you have a shrinking market in dollars, even if you have a larger user base. It's like the browser wars. It doesn't really matter who wins, because everyone loses economically. Remember Netscape Communications Corp?
By the way, MS never has to sell people on the next version. They just cease support for the version before last and corporate customers adopt the last version. Wash, rinse, repeat. See other discussions regarding their other product lines most notably windows, office, and Visual Studio.
From The Wealth of Nations:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." (Book 1, Chapter 10).
http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/index.php/smith/mo
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism :
Mercantilist domestic policy was more fragmented than its trade policy. While Adam Smith portrayed mercantilism as supportive of strict controls over the economy, many mercantilists disagreed. The early modern era was one of letters patent and government-imposed monopolies; some mercantilists supported these, but others acknowledged the corruption and inefficiency of such systems. Many mercantilists also realized the inevitable result of quotas and price ceilings were black markets. One notion mercantilists widely agreed upon was the need for economic oppression of the working population; laborers and farmers were to live at the "margins of subsistence". The goal was to maximize production, with no concern for consumption. Extra money, free time, or education for the "lower classes" was seen to inevitably lead to vice and laziness, and would result in harm to the economy.[7]
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
15,000 lb elephant? The gorilla may be more adept with it's tools, but the elephant has a lot of weight to swing around and can hurt a lot more(in magnitude and multitude) in the long run.
If the previous mainstream outside-the-OS/Office ventures of MS are any indication (see Xbox, Zune, et al) though, it's competitor(Adobe here) is going to put up a serious fight, and the consumer will enjoy the effects of the competition, just like if we got to watch an actual 500 lb gorilla and an actual 15,000 lb elephant fight...
Hmmm...time to go search the YouTube...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Hey Adobe! There are other OS's that OS X and Windows! Make your stuff work in Linux! ALL of it! I seriously hope that M$ creating this stuff will cause adobe to make their suites for Linux. I don't care if its closed source I just don't wanna have to use windows for graphics stuff anymore! I wanna use my 64bit processor for reals! And then I hope other popular art packages move to Linux and then the world will be safer and those Dell PC's with Ubuntu installed will be worth something to some people! Some people like me!
Balderdash!
Somebody yells "patents" and everybody agrees even if no information is given, at least it's a nice sound byte to buy karma. What patents might that be? Are there any?... and how would they be used? ... aw forget it because that might lead to constructive or clear points.
It's unfortunate so many people are willing to jump on a bandwagon because that's where the party is.
Hey Microsoft sucks YAY!
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Sou rce
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo
These are still new, but Macrobe is making sure these are all cross platform.
With Flex you can create Flash content. You just need to know how to do Action Script.
I've attended many conferences in computer science and the physical sciences (I develop visualization tools for the energy industry) and I have to say SIGGRAPH is hands-down the most fun conference I attend. SIGGRAPH includes core graphics, advanced hardware, and special techniques used for movies and video games. This year there were several "how they did it" sessions from major movie studios. The young F/X Turks get up and expalin their amazing tricks to adulation of the audience. You can skim the exhibits and showrooms for a day for less than hundred dollars or listen to mathematically intense courses and papers all week.
2007 San Diego conference ended today. Los Angeles in 2008! (Big party city with all the studios)
Microsoft has too many battles going on. The list is long--MS vs Sony/NES, MS vs the Linux/Open source community, MS vs Apple iPod, MS vs Google, etc.. Now MS want to take on Adobe/Macromedia? In the end I think that this is a losing proposition for them. In fact it already might be happening. Their core product, the Windows OS, had a launch that was lackluster at best and Office had a little better reception than that. And it took them, what 5 years, to get it to market? Now they want to get into the graphics and web design market? This battle may be their undoing--their Stalingrad. MS should take a page out of the history books and realize that fighting on too many fronts usually leads to bad things. They need to keep their core business, and more importantly their core clientèle (ie Windows and Office) happy. Then narrow in on markets that they can overtake....but always keeping an eye toward the homeland. I don't think they are doing that. Think about it. Vista and new Office has lukewarm response (I have yet to know anyone that has upgraded that didn't buy a new computer), the Xbox 360 is having all kinds of hardware issues--for hardware that they are already subsidizing, the Zune officially blows (I don't know anyone that owns one...do you?), their "Live" suite of web services to compete with Google has completely dropped off the radar screen (zero buzz. I mean what happened to Live????), and now they want to get in the graphics arena? Hmmmm....looking like another half-baked business strategy. BTW, didn't MS already attempt a "Flash killer", some years back? Wasn't called Quicksilver or something like that?
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
Yah, you are missing the used computer market. Mac users who bother to upgrade sell their computers for a premium, the used prices are inflated so it works well to buy new, cheaper than upgrading components and you get the warranty.
Why? because macs obsolete a bit slower. I have a 7 year old iBook G3 that still gets used for capturing video and sorting clips in the field; the equivalent toshiba with its crappy case and expensive add-ons is already disposed of. A 4-year old machine will run OS X 10.4 fine.
What this means in practical terms to the discussion at hand is that I know quite a few freelance layout specialists who know damn little about their Macs but know their primary tools (Quark, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.) exactly as much as they feel they need to. This means that they haven't upgraded for years, software or hardware, since their setup is essentially a locked-down turnkey system: stable and adequately fast for the task. The biggest speed boost is in the wetware, anyway.
A couple of examples: 3 years ago I was talking to someone who specializes in complex books like naturalist and travel guides. His rig was a maxed out and optimized PowerMac 8500 running OS 8. He couldn't afford the downtime of upgrading, because he didn't want to distract himself from churning out quality books and raking in freelance $. Last weekend I met a government document specialist who is finally moving to OS X with considerable anxiety, and is even more anxious about moving away from that nasty Quark thing to a new set of keyboard commands and costly paradigms.
Nerds have trouble grasping this, because they see corporate shops where the graphic dept. has spanky new quads, or they're used to an upgrade frenzy every time nvidia drops a log. I straddle both worlds, so I can tell you that quite a few Mac users are stealthed out there on their antiques, while many windows users are snapping up $400 dells and lenovos. I think this factor skews the installed user base / market share equation, and I'm pretty sure Adobe knows about them (though they probably don't care much).
Damn those pesky terrorists