BBC "Not In Bed With Bill Gates"

whoever57 writes "The BBC's head of technology denied rumors that a secret deal with Microsoft was behind the XP-only launch of the BBC's iPlayer. According to Ashley Highfield, the reason that the player only supports Windows XP is that only a small number of Linux visitors have come to the BBC's website. Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that 'Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide,' despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed-source flash player)."

Comments

Re:BBC's charter

[ByOhTek]

A news organization free of political influence...?

What are they going to legislate next? Not-wet water?

Re:Lame reason.

[ultranova]

Or...... you cater to your audience. I don't see the problem with any of this. I STILL haven't coded my website to be compliant with Konqueror or Safari. That's not to say they don't work in either, I just don't care because the ratio of Windows and IE+Firefox to Safari+Konqueror+every_other_OS_specific_browser_ever is something like 100:1.

All websites and webapps I've ever created get debugged until they pass the W3C validator, both HTML and CSS, with no errors or warnings, on any input (for webapps). Amateur pride, I know; if I ever started developing them as a job, I'm sure I couldn't afford the time to do a good job and would start pulling statistics out of my ass to justify that. However, I hope I still wouldn't actually brag in public for doing a crappy job.

Oh well, at least you're posting as Anonymous Coward, so I guess you still feel some shame...