The other solution (and to the top-menu-bar) would be pop-up menus, unfortunatly the luddites have made sure that everybody thinks they are not user-friendly.
They're not. More accurately, they're very unintuitive and have low "discoverability". They are, however, extremely fast to access (you're probably envisaging something like these).
A reasonable optional extra for experts, but a poor default choice.
...it extends the taskbar onto the secondary monitor, along with a host of other things - invaluable for multiple monitors.
Yeah, I've seen it and I don't like it. You still end up with the problem of having to traverse across two screens if the button you want to click is on the other one.
I'm of the opinion that each monitor should have a Taskbar displaying the windows currently on that monitor. Less desirably, the whole thing should be replicated on both monitors.
My solution for OS X would be much the same - each monitor gets its own menu bar, either tied to whichever application is at the top of the stack on that monitor, or mirrored on both.
Really ? Lets take something like a new drug (being one of those things people are always insisting would be impossible without patents). Are you seriously suggesting some company is going to take a new drug, analyse it, copy it, test it and get it approved by $NATIONAL_DRUG_AUTHORITY in, say, (let's be generous with our definition of "as soon as it comes to market") a month ? 6 months ? A year ? Two years ?
You are aware that patents extend far beyond software and electronic devices, right?
Uh, yeah, In fact I was specifically thinking of things that *weren't* software or electronic, because they're probably amongst the easiest to copy.
There are a LOT of mechanical devices that are patentable, and mechanical devices can be disassembled and their designs copied in a matter of days.
If it can really be disassembled and copied "in a few days", chances are pretty good it didn't deserve a patent in the first place, because it sure as hell couldn't be doing anything particularly new.
"Hey guys, I've got an idea...let's remove the ability to make money off massive R&D investments by making it so that people who didn't do any of the work can produce and sell a product as soon as it comes to market!"
Can you think of any patentable (or patented) product where a competitor would really be able to analyse, copy, produce and market it "as soon as it comes to market" ?
Taking away the protections the law currently gives would discourage new ideas because they would no longer be profitable.
Of course they would. Not *as* profitable, to be sure, but still profitable.
With Windows, I often have to drag to the task bar, wait for the target program to open, and then find the program I want.
Try dragging and using alt+tab to switch between apps. Much quicker.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with MacOS's single menu bar, however.
And the current finder, despite all of its warts, is still easier to navigate around than the Windows Explorer.
Now that I can't agree with. I've *always* found Finder to be slow and clumsy to manage files with, particular once directory structures get at all complex. Give me a directory tree + file listing any day over any "view" Finder has ever had.
With Windows, the philosophy is that the program *is* the window, wich results in programs where you have document windows inside program windows.
No, it's not. The Windows philosophy is that windows get their own menus. It's got nothing to do with "the program is the window" - Windows programs have been using multiple windows for over a decade.
I remember the difference between Win95 at work and Mac OS 8.5 at home pretty clearly; the previous poster is right. Mac OS was very far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than Windows, which started becoming unusable after about 6 hours of uptime.
Sounds like your Windows PC was very broken, or crippled with a large number of legacy applications and/or drivers. Windows 9x was far from a panacea of stability, but it was leagues ahead of MacOS, where buggy applications *regularly* crashed the entire machine. Shit, I was always happy to get more than an hour or two out of a MacOS machine before Navigator or something else popped up the ubiquitous bomb.
Then there was the multitasking, where just holding down the mouse button on MacOS's menu brought the entire machine to a halt, where putting something like a file [de]compression out of focus increased the time it took by orders of magnitude and where applications could - and often did - lock up the entire machine by going into some processing loop.
At least when I left a file copy or zip/rar/arj/etc operation in the background on Windows 9x, it proceeded at 95% of the speed it would have in the foreground, and didn't drag the entire machine into a tarpit with it.
Let's also not forget some of those other gems classic MacOS had, like manually specifying application memory usage and disk cache sizes.
Windows's multitasking and memory management weren't perfect, but at least they were there (and worked well most of the time, if you didn't have any 16 bit applications or drivers). MacOS's version of the former was effectively just the ability to have multiple programs loaded at once and switch between them, and the latter practically didn't even exist.
I spent most of the '90s using OS/2 and Windows NT, so anything involving MacOS was extremely painful, but I also spent non-trivial amounts of time using MacOS 7.x - 9.x and Windows 9x - and there's no way in hell MacOS was a better platform than Windows 9x from the perspectives of stability, multitasking and responsiveness (intuitiveness and usability maybe, but I've personally never found it any better in those regards than Windows or OS/2). MacOS - all the way up to 9.x - was technologically little more than a prettier version of Windows 3.x, and it was painfully obvious any time you tried to do more than one thing at once with it.
I still think the single menubar at the top of the screen that switches for apps is one of the worst UI elements ever, and the best thing Apple could do is wipe it out in the next release of OS X.
My only complaint about MacOS's single menu bar is to do with multi-monitor configurations - it's annoying to have to constantly go back to the "primary" monitor to access a menu. Other than that, as far as I'm concerned, it's just a different way of doing things - learn the rules of how it works and live by them.
(Windows's Taskbar has a similarly annoying flaw regarding multi-monitor setups).
Six or eight years ago, Mac OS 8.5 was clearly superior to Windows. The desktop was more intuitive, more responsive, crashed less, and had far fewer security problems.
I think you've got your pink glasses on there, mate.
Non-flamebait (unless you want to hang/defend Steve Jobs over everything he did in the past 15 years), interesting and tech-related.
It's mostly flamebait when you consider several of those "flip flops" happened over the course of many years (well over 10 in one case) and most of the rest are just natural progressions. About the only ones I can agree could be classed as "flip flops" are the Video iPod and PPC.
Then in August 1998, all things went pear shaped and IE was supposedly built in as a core part of the Windows platform.
Before this, IE4 - when installed - replaced several parts of the system (eg: explorer) with those that used the IE components as Windows 98 (and followers did). So, effectively, as soon as you installed IE4, IE was "part of the OS".
Before this, IE3 was the first version to be of the "component" archtecture.
Although, I'd dispute this saying that the Windows 98lite project managed to remove it completely by my recollection.
98lite only worked by replacing the parts of WIndows 98 that relied on IE with those from Windows 95. If you didn't have Windows 95 already, you couldn't use it.
They're going to offer a whole 2meg! A Telstra spokesperson said "typical consumers do not need faster Internet".
But this is true (and probably will be for some time yet). The real problem is Telstra want to charge as much for their "broadband" as other companies charge for 24/1 ADSL2+.
If Apple held a near monopoly over the computing industry, and used their position to prevent others from competing with them, absolutely. But Apple doesn't hold that kind of position.
There are two things that need to be kept in mind when making this sort of comparison:
1. Microsoft were not found to be a monopoly of "the computing industry". They were found to be a monopoly of a very specific part of it - consumer OSes for x86 platforms (so, according to the antitrust trial, Microsoft and Apple aren't even competitors).
2. If you apply the same market definition to Apple at the time - consumer OSes for PPC platforms - it would be difficult to see how they were not a monopoly along the same lines.
IE didn't capture massive market share because it was way better than Netscape (although it was better for quite some time), it captured the market share because it was the default browser of Windows.
This argument is common, but it doesn't hold water when you consider the largest growth in IE's marketshare was the period of time between IE4's first public beta until 6 - 12 months after Windows 98 was released.
During this time, the vast bulk of end users were only able to get IE4 from either an internet download, or magazine cover CDs and the like.
IE4 most certainly *did* "captured massive market share" because it was better. People sure as hell weren't manually installing it because it was worse.
But porting office to macos doesn't hurt their FUD about how anything that touches opensource is somehow corrupted by it.
Far from FUD, the implications of using GPLed libraries are quite serious from a closed-source software developer's perspective.
Microsoft's problem isn't with Open Source, it's with the GPL (I'd imagine they aren't even *that* bothered by the LGPL) and the cascading effect of "using" GPLed code.
Plus, I think they want to be seen as the only OS for commodity hardware.
This would be a reasonable argument if:
a) more than a minority of people bought computers without an OS (or were even capable of understanding that the computer and its OS are independent); and
b) most people who *do* buy OS-less PCs weren't already aware of alternative OSes.
The vast bulk of consumers don't even understand there is a separation between the hardware and the OS.
I'd aruge that IE is a long ways from being a "drop in replacement" for Firefox. IE is in the stone ages functionality wise compared to Firefox.
Certainly true. IE, however, is more than just a browser application and Firefox is not even a drop-in (let alone widespread) replacement for the other functionality it provides.
The only reason anyone is still using IE is because they have to (because site X only works with IE because the idiot web developer didn't test it with anything else)
Or because they're a developer who wants the functionality IE provides in their app, but can't assume anything more than IE is installed on an end users computer.
I would suggest Rhapsody to Mac OS X 10.2 is probably a better comparison.
Well, since Rhapsody was basically just NeXT with a MacOS shell glued on top of it, that's pretty much what I said;).
The surprise, in some ways, is that it's only being delayed by a couple of months, especially, as I understand it, Vista is actually more of a decendent of NT 5.0 (W2000) than NT5.1 (XP) so there's a degree of re-inventing the wheel that's going on too.
Vista has been developed from the Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) codebase - they "reset" Vista after it was released. So, effectively, it's only been in development for (depending in where you want to count from) 3 - 5 years. Take that into account, and it's really only "late" from a marketing perspective, not a software development perspective.
Vista _originally_ came from the Windows XP (5.1) codebase, but they "threw most of that code out" after Windows 2003 was released. What I suspect really happened was that much of the work that went into "Longhorn" was also going into Win2k3 (because it's a distinct improvement over XP - noticably faster, for example) so after Win2k3 was released they "started from scratch" using the Win2k3 codebase, which actually had a lot of the prior work towards Vista in it.
The low level changes in Vista are significant. There has a been a *lot* of development work done in and around the kernel and other low level services (sound, I/O, etc) to identify, compartmentalise - and where possible remove interdependencies between - modules and system layers. Part of this process involved writing a lot test harnesses for these areas, so various parts of the system can be independently "proven correct" (ie: they do what the documentation says they do). Microsoft have really jumped onto the whole "verifiable software" bandwagon, from what I've been reading (and some of their developers are chafing because of it - it results in a lot more testing and a lot less coding).
I fully expect Vista to be a massive improvement over Windows XP/2003 - albeit with relatively few obvious changes (apart from the GUI). On the other hand, I don't expect it to have a huge impact on the current plague of malware, even in the longer term.
Ah, but it does matter to businesses that windows users have IE there by default. This way IE defaults to 90% of computers, so you _must_ code for IE (you know they have IE, but you're not sure they have firefox).
No, you should be able to code for the common denominator that both IE and Firefox support.
If IE was uninstallable and as non standards compliant as it is today, people could code by standards and the burden would be on MS to fix their archaic browser.
Are you saying there is not a single common level of compatibility that both IE and Firefox can hit ? Because I find that difficult to believe.
The difference being the web or the internet in general is not and should not be platform specific as the native code you are talking about.
Why ?
It doesn't make any business sense, let aside ideological reasons. The only business sense about it, is that Microsoft with these anti-competetive moves, makes it a better cost-effective decison to tie stuff with their products.
Or that IE provides functionality - or development abilities - that Firefox (and/or "standards") does not.
If IE is either a) easier to target or b) more featureful in useful ways, then targeting IE specifically *does* make sense.
Same with media. Let wmp be uninstallable, or ship all codecs by default. It would be a better customer experience if I could just play any file they send me as I do in linux, than to have to hunt down codecs...
I've tried the "media experience" in Linux several times. "Hunting down codecs" is usually the *least* painful part of it.
Microsoft - as with every other vendor - have to provide a baseline level of functionality and capabilities with their OS. Both their customers and developers demand it. Shipping "every codec" is an impractical solution to this problem, since "every codec" is a fast-moving target (and that's completely ignoring any legal implications and/or additional costs).
It's also important to point out here, that what you appear to mean by "make it uninstallable" refers *only* to the player, and not the codecs. If you *are* referring to the codecs, then what you want to do will negatively impact the OS for basically everyone who matters.
I don't know what side of the internet you live on, but over here divX is used alot in all sorts of videos.
Nowhere near as many as Quicktime or WMP, in my experience. How many film trailers get distributed in DivX ?
DivX is a fairly popular video format that windows just does not have support for. Just as it doesn't play quicktime movies out of the box. Or is that also not a commonly used codec? It's a political decision and not one based on your satisfaction as a customer, deal with it.
It is a political decision, but it is also a technical one. Developers need a baseline to target. Expecting Microsoft (or any other commercial OS vendor) to provide - and by extension, support - code that isn't theirs and that they have no control over with their OS, is unreasonable.
Quicktime IMHO is and always was a superior format than anything microsoft.
Maybe so, but the atrociousness of the Quicktime player more than makes up for any superiorities it might have.
Remember MS ripping off Apple and reaching a settlement over it?.
I vaguely recall that had something to do with Microoft buying some "video accelleration code" from the same company Apple had acquired it from.
Just as in IE, it doesn't make sense for a business to distribute a divX or a quicktime file, because then 90% of their users need to install the appropriate codec. So it's easier to just distribute a wmv file (or mpeg, but they are lower quality and have bigger file sizes). This is how Windows media, through sane business decisions, gets unfairly popular. Once you let wmp be there by default, the rest are just logical steps businesses will take.
You probably meant this facetiously, but if you look at the numbers for what MS blew on the Longwind debacle, and what it would cost them to buy a license for OS X, it makes sense.
Not really. They'd only be taking a technological step forward in a handful of areas. The best you could say about the rest is it was a step sideways.
MS has just spent several billion on a failed development project, they're going to ship SP4 six years late and pretend it's Longwind, and they really need to consider whether it's a good business decision to keep throwing good money after bad, trying to update their botched VMS knock-off.
If you think Vista is just going to be "SP4", you need to look harder. It's an update on the order of the one Apple did to NeXT to get OS X. At worst, it's changes on the order of NT 4.0 -> NT 5.0
It has - at least according to the people working on it - *substantially* improved the quality and manageability of the NT codebase.
Do not be misled by a relative lack of highly-user-visible changes.
Is there any way MS could pull the rug out from under Apple if Apple goes further than MS likes? You know, oops, Windows won't activate on Macs anymore.
What possible reason could they have for even *wanting* to do that, let alone actually doing it ?
Microsoft views IE as a "rich client" and one more reason to tie people to Windows.
There's also the rather significant problem of Firefox not being a drop-in replacement for IE.
It's the same reason they will never have a Linux version of Office as long as they view Linux as any kind of threat to their OS.
OS X is a vastly greater "threat" to Windows than Linux is on the Desktop, but Microsoft are happy to make money selling Office for OS X. Your argument does not hold water.
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They're not. More accurately, they're very unintuitive and have low "discoverability". They are, however, extremely fast to access (you're probably envisaging something like these).
A reasonable optional extra for experts, but a poor default choice.
Yeah, I've seen it and I don't like it. You still end up with the problem of having to traverse across two screens if the button you want to click is on the other one.
I'm of the opinion that each monitor should have a Taskbar displaying the windows currently on that monitor. Less desirably, the whole thing should be replicated on both monitors.
My solution for OS X would be much the same - each monitor gets its own menu bar, either tied to whichever application is at the top of the stack on that monitor, or mirrored on both.
Microsoft sell a hell of a lot more than Operating Systems (and pretty much always have).
Really ? Lets take something like a new drug (being one of those things people are always insisting would be impossible without patents). Are you seriously suggesting some company is going to take a new drug, analyse it, copy it, test it and get it approved by $NATIONAL_DRUG_AUTHORITY in, say, (let's be generous with our definition of "as soon as it comes to market") a month ? 6 months ? A year ? Two years ?
You are aware that patents extend far beyond software and electronic devices, right?
Uh, yeah, In fact I was specifically thinking of things that *weren't* software or electronic, because they're probably amongst the easiest to copy.
There are a LOT of mechanical devices that are patentable, and mechanical devices can be disassembled and their designs copied in a matter of days.
If it can really be disassembled and copied "in a few days", chances are pretty good it didn't deserve a patent in the first place, because it sure as hell couldn't be doing anything particularly new.
Can you think of any patentable (or patented) product where a competitor would really be able to analyse, copy, produce and market it "as soon as it comes to market" ?
Taking away the protections the law currently gives would discourage new ideas because they would no longer be profitable.
Of course they would. Not *as* profitable, to be sure, but still profitable.
Try dragging and using alt+tab to switch between apps. Much quicker.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with MacOS's single menu bar, however.
And the current finder, despite all of its warts, is still easier to navigate around than the Windows Explorer.
Now that I can't agree with. I've *always* found Finder to be slow and clumsy to manage files with, particular once directory structures get at all complex. Give me a directory tree + file listing any day over any "view" Finder has ever had.
With Windows, the philosophy is that the program *is* the window, wich results in programs where you have document windows inside program windows.
No, it's not. The Windows philosophy is that windows get their own menus. It's got nothing to do with "the program is the window" - Windows programs have been using multiple windows for over a decade.
Sounds like your Windows PC was very broken, or crippled with a large number of legacy applications and/or drivers. Windows 9x was far from a panacea of stability, but it was leagues ahead of MacOS, where buggy applications *regularly* crashed the entire machine. Shit, I was always happy to get more than an hour or two out of a MacOS machine before Navigator or something else popped up the ubiquitous bomb.
Then there was the multitasking, where just holding down the mouse button on MacOS's menu brought the entire machine to a halt, where putting something like a file [de]compression out of focus increased the time it took by orders of magnitude and where applications could - and often did - lock up the entire machine by going into some processing loop.
At least when I left a file copy or zip/rar/arj/etc operation in the background on Windows 9x, it proceeded at 95% of the speed it would have in the foreground, and didn't drag the entire machine into a tarpit with it.
Let's also not forget some of those other gems classic MacOS had, like manually specifying application memory usage and disk cache sizes.
Windows's multitasking and memory management weren't perfect, but at least they were there (and worked well most of the time, if you didn't have any 16 bit applications or drivers). MacOS's version of the former was effectively just the ability to have multiple programs loaded at once and switch between them, and the latter practically didn't even exist.
I spent most of the '90s using OS/2 and Windows NT, so anything involving MacOS was extremely painful, but I also spent non-trivial amounts of time using MacOS 7.x - 9.x and Windows 9x - and there's no way in hell MacOS was a better platform than Windows 9x from the perspectives of stability, multitasking and responsiveness (intuitiveness and usability maybe, but I've personally never found it any better in those regards than Windows or OS/2). MacOS - all the way up to 9.x - was technologically little more than a prettier version of Windows 3.x, and it was painfully obvious any time you tried to do more than one thing at once with it.
My only complaint about MacOS's single menu bar is to do with multi-monitor configurations - it's annoying to have to constantly go back to the "primary" monitor to access a menu. Other than that, as far as I'm concerned, it's just a different way of doing things - learn the rules of how it works and live by them.
(Windows's Taskbar has a similarly annoying flaw regarding multi-monitor setups).
I think you've got your pink glasses on there, mate.
And it was. Right up until the astounding (to everyone) success of Windows 3.0.
It's mostly flamebait when you consider several of those "flip flops" happened over the course of many years (well over 10 in one case) and most of the rest are just natural progressions. About the only ones I can agree could be classed as "flip flops" are the Video iPod and PPC.
Before this, IE4 - when installed - replaced several parts of the system (eg: explorer) with those that used the IE components as Windows 98 (and followers did). So, effectively, as soon as you installed IE4, IE was "part of the OS".
Before this, IE3 was the first version to be of the "component" archtecture.
Although, I'd dispute this saying that the Windows 98lite project managed to remove it completely by my recollection.
98lite only worked by replacing the parts of WIndows 98 that relied on IE with those from Windows 95. If you didn't have Windows 95 already, you couldn't use it.
But this is true (and probably will be for some time yet). The real problem is Telstra want to charge as much for their "broadband" as other companies charge for 24/1 ADSL2+.
There are two things that need to be kept in mind when making this sort of comparison:
1. Microsoft were not found to be a monopoly of "the computing industry". They were found to be a monopoly of a very specific part of it - consumer OSes for x86 platforms (so, according to the antitrust trial, Microsoft and Apple aren't even competitors).
2. If you apply the same market definition to Apple at the time - consumer OSes for PPC platforms - it would be difficult to see how they were not a monopoly along the same lines.
This argument is common, but it doesn't hold water when you consider the largest growth in IE's marketshare was the period of time between IE4's first public beta until 6 - 12 months after Windows 98 was released.
During this time, the vast bulk of end users were only able to get IE4 from either an internet download, or magazine cover CDs and the like.
IE4 most certainly *did* "captured massive market share" because it was better. People sure as hell weren't manually installing it because it was worse.
Yes, there would.
And it's all carefully sectioned off so it can't infect the BSD code.
You *do* understand what using GPLed code in the FreeBSD kernel would mean, right ?
Linking to a library is a pretty weird definition of "taking without giving back".
Far from FUD, the implications of using GPLed libraries are quite serious from a closed-source software developer's perspective.
Microsoft's problem isn't with Open Source, it's with the GPL (I'd imagine they aren't even *that* bothered by the LGPL) and the cascading effect of "using" GPLed code.
Plus, I think they want to be seen as the only OS for commodity hardware.
This would be a reasonable argument if:
a) more than a minority of people bought computers without an OS (or were even capable of understanding that the computer and its OS are independent); and
b) most people who *do* buy OS-less PCs weren't already aware of alternative OSes.
The vast bulk of consumers don't even understand there is a separation between the hardware and the OS.
Certainly true. IE, however, is more than just a browser application and Firefox is not even a drop-in (let alone widespread) replacement for the other functionality it provides.
The only reason anyone is still using IE is because they have to (because site X only works with IE because the idiot web developer didn't test it with anything else)
Or because they're a developer who wants the functionality IE provides in their app, but can't assume anything more than IE is installed on an end users computer.
Well, since Rhapsody was basically just NeXT with a MacOS shell glued on top of it, that's pretty much what I said ;).
The surprise, in some ways, is that it's only being delayed by a couple of months, especially, as I understand it, Vista is actually more of a decendent of NT 5.0 (W2000) than NT5.1 (XP) so there's a degree of re-inventing the wheel that's going on too.
Vista has been developed from the Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) codebase - they "reset" Vista after it was released. So, effectively, it's only been in development for (depending in where you want to count from) 3 - 5 years. Take that into account, and it's really only "late" from a marketing perspective, not a software development perspective.
Vista _originally_ came from the Windows XP (5.1) codebase, but they "threw most of that code out" after Windows 2003 was released. What I suspect really happened was that much of the work that went into "Longhorn" was also going into Win2k3 (because it's a distinct improvement over XP - noticably faster, for example) so after Win2k3 was released they "started from scratch" using the Win2k3 codebase, which actually had a lot of the prior work towards Vista in it.
The low level changes in Vista are significant. There has a been a *lot* of development work done in and around the kernel and other low level services (sound, I/O, etc) to identify, compartmentalise - and where possible remove interdependencies between - modules and system layers. Part of this process involved writing a lot test harnesses for these areas, so various parts of the system can be independently "proven correct" (ie: they do what the documentation says they do). Microsoft have really jumped onto the whole "verifiable software" bandwagon, from what I've been reading (and some of their developers are chafing because of it - it results in a lot more testing and a lot less coding).
I fully expect Vista to be a massive improvement over Windows XP/2003 - albeit with relatively few obvious changes (apart from the GUI). On the other hand, I don't expect it to have a huge impact on the current plague of malware, even in the longer term.
Ah, but it does matter to businesses that windows users have IE there by default. This way IE defaults to 90% of computers, so you _must_ code for IE (you know they have IE, but you're not sure they have firefox).
No, you should be able to code for the common denominator that both IE and Firefox support.
If IE was uninstallable and as non standards compliant as it is today, people could code by standards and the burden would be on MS to fix their archaic browser.
Are you saying there is not a single common level of compatibility that both IE and Firefox can hit ? Because I find that difficult to believe.
The difference being the web or the internet in general is not and should not be platform specific as the native code you are talking about.
Why ?
It doesn't make any business sense, let aside ideological reasons. The only business sense about it, is that Microsoft with these anti-competetive moves, makes it a better cost-effective decison to tie stuff with their products.
Or that IE provides functionality - or development abilities - that Firefox (and/or "standards") does not.
If IE is either a) easier to target or b) more featureful in useful ways, then targeting IE specifically *does* make sense.
Same with media. Let wmp be uninstallable, or ship all codecs by default. It would be a better customer experience if I could just play any file they send me as I do in linux, than to have to hunt down codecs...
I've tried the "media experience" in Linux several times. "Hunting down codecs" is usually the *least* painful part of it.
Microsoft - as with every other vendor - have to provide a baseline level of functionality and capabilities with their OS. Both their customers and developers demand it. Shipping "every codec" is an impractical solution to this problem, since "every codec" is a fast-moving target (and that's completely ignoring any legal implications and/or additional costs).
It's also important to point out here, that what you appear to mean by "make it uninstallable" refers *only* to the player, and not the codecs. If you *are* referring to the codecs, then what you want to do will negatively impact the OS for basically everyone who matters.
I don't know what side of the internet you live on, but over here divX is used alot in all sorts of videos.
Nowhere near as many as Quicktime or WMP, in my experience. How many film trailers get distributed in DivX ?
DivX is a fairly popular video format that windows just does not have support for. Just as it doesn't play quicktime movies out of the box. Or is that also not a commonly used codec? It's a political decision and not one based on your satisfaction as a customer, deal with it.
It is a political decision, but it is also a technical one. Developers need a baseline to target. Expecting Microsoft (or any other commercial OS vendor) to provide - and by extension, support - code that isn't theirs and that they have no control over with their OS, is unreasonable.
Quicktime IMHO is and always was a superior format than anything microsoft.
Maybe so, but the atrociousness of the Quicktime player more than makes up for any superiorities it might have.
Remember MS ripping off Apple and reaching a settlement over it?.
I vaguely recall that had something to do with Microoft buying some "video accelleration code" from the same company Apple had acquired it from.
Just as in IE, it doesn't make sense for a business to distribute a divX or a quicktime file, because then 90% of their users need to install the appropriate codec. So it's easier to just distribute a wmv file (or mpeg, but they are lower quality and have bigger file sizes). This is how Windows media, through sane business decisions, gets unfairly popular. Once you let wmp be there by default, the rest are just logical steps businesses will take.
You seem to be arguing that busi
You probably meant this facetiously, but if you look at the numbers for what MS blew on the Longwind debacle, and what it would cost them to buy a license for OS X, it makes sense.
Not really. They'd only be taking a technological step forward in a handful of areas. The best you could say about the rest is it was a step sideways.
MS has just spent several billion on a failed development project, they're going to ship SP4 six years late and pretend it's Longwind, and they really need to consider whether it's a good business decision to keep throwing good money after bad, trying to update their botched VMS knock-off.
If you think Vista is just going to be "SP4", you need to look harder. It's an update on the order of the one Apple did to NeXT to get OS X. At worst, it's changes on the order of NT 4.0 -> NT 5.0
It has - at least according to the people working on it - *substantially* improved the quality and manageability of the NT codebase.
Do not be misled by a relative lack of highly-user-visible changes.
What possible reason could they have for even *wanting* to do that, let alone actually doing it ?
There's also the rather significant problem of Firefox not being a drop-in replacement for IE.
It's the same reason they will never have a Linux version of Office as long as they view Linux as any kind of threat to their OS.
OS X is a vastly greater "threat" to Windows than Linux is on the Desktop, but Microsoft are happy to make money selling Office for OS X. Your argument does not hold water.