Betamax was used for digital storage starting in 1981 - using the PCM-F1 digital audio processor and the SL-2000 Betamax recorder, you had an excellent portable digital audio recorder and mastering machine.
I see your reasoning for skepticism, although at the time the threat was very real to Apple and their customers. The possibility of losing Office for the Mac was impacting our purchase decisions about six months before the settlement, being relieved by the famous "Big Brother" teleconference with Bill Gates at the 1997 Mac World keynote.
Internally, Microsoft must have discussed the cancellation of Office which probably triggered the plea from Ben Waldman to finish and ship Mac Office 97 (it didn't ship until late 98). He speaks of the "threat to cancel" as if it was real. I don't think he'd make that up and present it to Bill Gates if it wasn't real - he would have received a "what in the hell are you talking about?" response from Gates. Ben knew it was a powerful bargaining chip - and Microsoft is no stranger to using powerful bargaining chips. Ben sounded like he had to beg to keep the project alive, again not something he would do if there wasn't a threat to cancel. If it wasn't real, there was general paranoia that it was in the industry and among users, and even within Microsoft, which helped their bargaining power.
In the end, Microsoft got IE on the Mac for five years, Apple got Office development for five more years and Microsoft put up $150million to give them a downside if they chose to harm Apple. The patent disputes going all the way back to the "Look and Feel" suit was settled this way.
In court, Bill Gates has a reputation for playing real dumb on the witness stand anyway, but the meat of it was the plea from Ben himself.
The Microsoft threat to kill Office for the Mac happened during negotiations leading up to 1997 as outlined in some court documents. Microsoft was in negotiations with Apple over patent disputes and considered abandoning Office for Mac, understanding it would do "a great deal of harm immediately" to Apple. There are a few other stories outlining the questioning of Bill Gates about this and the ultimate outcome of the settlement - the famous $150 million investment Microsoft made in Apple. Some said immediately that "Microsoft saved Apple" (and still say it), except Apple had $1.7billion in the bank at the time and could have operated for quite a while without selling another product. Doing the math, Microsoft profited quite handsomely from the sale of Apple stock in 2003.
We dislike the RIAA because they use questionable tactics...
Add to that... I dislike the RIAA because I don't believe they represent the Artists as much they they'd like us to think. Their members are most notably Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal, not the drummer who started distributing with a CD burner. If anything, those little guys want nothing to do with the RIAA. Smart people.
Why use any proprietary system which reaches 70% of the people when you can use Standards and reach 100% of the people? I fault the idiots who can't recognize the trap this is.
The other possibility is the people who spec this system are too young to recall how bad it was under the heyday of the Microsoft Dictatorship. Development stalled, bugs went unpatched, exploits soared, functionality went down, costs went up, better technologies died etc. Now, the younger generation doesn't believe you when you refer to Microsoft as the Evil Overlord. It's just another vendor now.
It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Yes, yet another prong in the dilemma. If they did discontinue Mac Office in 1997, they could viably claim that it wasn't worth maintaining, even though it would be quite obvious why they did it. It could have pushed Apple as a viable platform over the cliff. At this point, I would [almost] welcome them to try it. You're quite right that the vacuum they'd leave would be quickly flooded with competition for the entire class of software - or at least all the current alternatives (some of which are quite good) would step into the light. Oh, and the DOJ would have something to say as well.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
...and when Microsoft has wrapped your entire world into a compendium of proprietary digital glop with no hope of improvement, only then will you realize how bad it can be.
Yeah what kind of crazy system rewards the people who invented something and gives them some control over their invention?
Hah!... however, Microsoft allowed and encouraged adoption of FAT32 for a very long time, without consequence to anyone who did so. Because of their behavior, some smart lawyer could probably make a case that FAT32 is now public domain.
The TomTom I have carries a plain vanilla SD card. Any bets that it came from SanDisk (or wherever) already formatted with FAT32? I think SanDisk was one of the companies strong armed by Microsoft a while ago into buying a FAT32 license. Therefore, shouldn't the license to use said card transfer downstream? Or is it that nobody can write to a FAT32 partition without a further license? Microsoft will have its hands full if it's the latter - when The Planet attacks Microsoft in court like the RIAA.
I'd rather say that Standards were developing at the time - and there were certainly guidelines emanating from CERN and W3C. It really was the age of discovery with Netscape (and Sun and others including Microsoft) slowly adding functions to "the browser". The browser and server were designed to be stateless and uniform, but development and imagination were happening too slowly. I'll credit Microsoft with lighting a fire under everyone's butt. They showed the world how bad it could get if everyone sat back and waited for development to just happen. They threw a lot of resources at the Internet, but I believe the primary goal was to lock down ownership, not necessarily to improve the way things worked. The Internet as invented by Microsoft self destructed under the weight of 150,000 Windows specific viruses, irresponsible exploit vectors, the resulting spam and a host of other things that has made the Internet a dangerous place to be.
The gloves came off when Microsoft transformed their browser to be part of a client-server relationship. They provided the browser (IE), the authoring tools (Front Page) and the server technology (Server Extensions) from which to launch their proprietary communication system masquerading as an ordinary browser. Eventually, they tied all of that to their OS to make an inseparable monolithic system which nobody could really share in. They did release an SDK to build server extensions, but they certainly didn't interoperate with anything else nor reveal what was going on inside. Interoperability was not in Microsoft's interest and it left anyone not using IE on Windows trying to reverse engineer the flaming bag of shit that was handed them.
It seemed, to everyone else, that this ecosystem was designed to make competing systems look illiterate. It succeeded to such an extent that most of the corporate world believed that Microsoft was the only source for software. They had already trounced the document creation world and intended to do the same with the Internet. The Internet meant delivering commerce and private data (Passport), locking down media (Palladium), sourcing the news (MS-NBC) along with other related initiatives. The roadmap was being followed by those who understood that Microsoft wanted control of all these items in order to erect a toll booth for everyone - described in the most draconian, unflattering terms. I think the pundits were right. Microsoft wanted to gather your news, entertainment, banking and anything else they could grab, mark it up and sell it back to you. In turn, they could resell whatever they gathered back to businesses trying to reach you in the most invasive way possible.
They almost got away with it. Using a money=survival hammer on the rest of the industry didn't work so well with a shrinking group of radical, old school hackers. They gave birth to the OSS as we know it and are now thundering at the walls of Jericho.
Microsoft spent considerable effort over the years corrupting interoperability standards to favor themselves. I've got a list of things Microsoft "killed", or damaged so badly that nobody else could use it but I stumbled upon this page which really sums it up for me. It's got most of my list plus a few new ones (and I haven't even read all the chapters yet). It doesn't include things like Intel's NSP effort, which would have dramatically accelerated video on desktops (interesting to me since I'm in the Television Broadcast business). Microsoft objected to NSP, called every video hardware vendor and told them not to support it and threatened to cut anyone off who did. Details of that and a hundred similar unfriendly things are in the court transcripts somewhere.
I also recall all the "Made for Windows" stickers on everything which really meant "Incompatible with Anything Else". Some of the agreement terms included not supporting anything Microsoft deemed a competitor to t
I'm confused, would you rather be paying $50 for a browser?
Noooo Mr. Bond. My comment is only that The Browser was Netscape's only product. It didn't raise the eyebrow of Microsoft until it gained Java functionality. Microsoft's brilliant response was to suck the oxygen out of the room by giving IE away for free, including supplying it to ISPs to hand out to their customers. Down goes Netscape along with the vision of an openly interoperable, extensible future.
The IE browser was anything but free - the cost was a decade of technical stagnation, destroyed technologies and ultimately higher costs. It was the single proprietary expensive browser. From there, they could dictate which technologies we were allowed to use, replacing many superior technologies with their crudely inferior products. Microsoft employed textbook American Knowhow to knock out the competition through force of market and then essentially abandon further development. They spent more money and effort to lock everyone in to what ultimately became a contemptible ecosystem than to reinvent themselves every other year.
Was IE a better browser? Some argue that it wasn't. Microsoft was extending functionality in leaps and bounds through undocumented server plugins and quirky incompatibilities which nobody else could access. Their goal was for the Planet to see a blank screen on the Internet unless everyone was using a complete Microsoft technology chain from web site creation, through serving, all the way through viewing.
We forget that all this isn't about advancing technology, a better user experience and ease of development - it's about money. I'd prefer more open technologies to gain the upper hand, even take longer to develop, than see what we suffered for so long.
It was hard to sell a browser once IE was being given away for free. Their oxygen was cut off. Brilliant business move on the part of Microsoft. Bad for the promising new technology and shame on Microsoft for denying it to the rest of us.
Yup, Netscape and Java was buggy and ran like crap alright. With computers running at a blazing 120MHz with an astonishing 32MB of RAM, it's no wonder. But it was the seed of the idea which Microsoft correctly saw as a threat to their operating system monopoly. It had to be crushed.
Now we see Microsoft faltering as payment for years of bad behavior, soulless products, uninspired imagination (if any), refusal to interoperate and basically pitting themselves against the rest of the industry. In the face of innovations coming from outside of Microsoft, the only defense they have is to control or destroy the competition - the compelling reason to use their products (vendor lockin) is dissolving. My hat is off to what they've done in a business sense for the last few decades. I scorn them for the technologies they've killed off because they didn't exclusively get paid for them.
That's closer to what I remember, but it was more than competition (or power), it was survival. Microsoft recognized this Java stuff running on Netscape had the potential to obviate the Windows operating system. Since Microsoft couldn't counter this technology with something more compelling than "write once, run anywhere", the best they could do was partner with Sun, then become a bull in the china shop to destroy Java from the inside.
Only through the force of programmers who eventually detected what Microsoft was up to. Please yip in if you have experience in this era of Visual Studio 97 and Visual Studio 6.0 and what it meant to polluting Java.
Initially, Microsoft "partnered" with Sun to embrace and develop Java. They released Visual Studio which included tools to work with Java - on Microsoft's terms. Sun quickly realized that Microsoft was targeting the Java language and the JVM for destruction and sued. Microsoft was extending Java to include Windows-only system calls, violating the agreements.
By the next year (1998), Microsoft was ordered to stop producing tools which used Sun's Java - but they continued with their own implementation (J++) which essentially extended Java but stripped away all the cross platform functionality. That was a knife in Java as intended - write once, run anywhere. By that time too many developers were using Microsoft's tools and they went along for the ride.
This is why so many people run the other way when Microsoft wants to get on board the Open Source bandwagon. Your throats are scheduled to be slit next.
Fascinating. Microsoft murdered Netscape and Java for going in this direction a decade ago and now they're writing about it like they invented the notion.
Having run Xserves as servers since 2001 and Mac Minis as DNS servers since 2005 - without issues - all I can say is even Macs can't win against a rookie admin.
The Apple clones were faster. As startups, they could hand pick smaller batches of components - expecting to only build 25,000 machines at a pop. They could cherry pick an entire run of one component and design to a known tolerance for the life of the manufacturing cycle. For Apple to build 600,000 machines of one model, they'd need to lower the performance expectation to accommodate component tolerances from several runs of the same part over many months.
I think it was StarMax with a 533MHz machine when apple was shipping 400MHz. The cooling air exhaust port felt like a hair dryer, but... hey... they did it.
Slashdot Mirror
...Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.
Maybe iRobot can put them to work making a Roomba Pool Skimmer... oh, wait, pool skimmers exist already.
Their goal is to go to the moon. Everyone knows that (!) is mooning someone, right?
Betamax was used for digital storage starting in 1981 - using the PCM-F1 digital audio processor and the SL-2000 Betamax recorder, you had an excellent portable digital audio recorder and mastering machine.
I see your reasoning for skepticism, although at the time the threat was very real to Apple and their customers. The possibility of losing Office for the Mac was impacting our purchase decisions about six months before the settlement, being relieved by the famous "Big Brother" teleconference with Bill Gates at the 1997 Mac World keynote.
Internally, Microsoft must have discussed the cancellation of Office which probably triggered the plea from Ben Waldman to finish and ship Mac Office 97 (it didn't ship until late 98). He speaks of the "threat to cancel" as if it was real. I don't think he'd make that up and present it to Bill Gates if it wasn't real - he would have received a "what in the hell are you talking about?" response from Gates. Ben knew it was a powerful bargaining chip - and Microsoft is no stranger to using powerful bargaining chips. Ben sounded like he had to beg to keep the project alive, again not something he would do if there wasn't a threat to cancel. If it wasn't real, there was general paranoia that it was in the industry and among users, and even within Microsoft, which helped their bargaining power.
In the end, Microsoft got IE on the Mac for five years, Apple got Office development for five more years and Microsoft put up $150million to give them a downside if they chose to harm Apple. The patent disputes going all the way back to the "Look and Feel" suit was settled this way.
In court, Bill Gates has a reputation for playing real dumb on the witness stand anyway, but the meat of it was the plea from Ben himself.
When was this?
The Microsoft threat to kill Office for the Mac happened during negotiations leading up to 1997 as outlined in some court documents. Microsoft was in negotiations with Apple over patent disputes and considered abandoning Office for Mac, understanding it would do "a great deal of harm immediately" to Apple. There are a few other stories outlining the questioning of Bill Gates about this and the ultimate outcome of the settlement - the famous $150 million investment Microsoft made in Apple. Some said immediately that "Microsoft saved Apple" (and still say it), except Apple had $1.7billion in the bank at the time and could have operated for quite a while without selling another product. Doing the math, Microsoft profited quite handsomely from the sale of Apple stock in 2003.
I don't see bug fixes in that list.
We dislike the RIAA because they use questionable tactics...
Add to that... I dislike the RIAA because I don't believe they represent the Artists as much they they'd like us to think. Their members are most notably Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal, not the drummer who started distributing with a CD burner. If anything, those little guys want nothing to do with the RIAA. Smart people.
Why use any proprietary system which reaches 70% of the people when you can use Standards and reach 100% of the people? I fault the idiots who can't recognize the trap this is.
The other possibility is the people who spec this system are too young to recall how bad it was under the heyday of the Microsoft Dictatorship. Development stalled, bugs went unpatched, exploits soared, functionality went down, costs went up, better technologies died etc. Now, the younger generation doesn't believe you when you refer to Microsoft as the Evil Overlord. It's just another vendor now.
I guess we have come a long way.
It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Yes, yet another prong in the dilemma. If they did discontinue Mac Office in 1997, they could viably claim that it wasn't worth maintaining, even though it would be quite obvious why they did it. It could have pushed Apple as a viable platform over the cliff. At this point, I would [almost] welcome them to try it. You're quite right that the vacuum they'd leave would be quickly flooded with competition for the entire class of software - or at least all the current alternatives (some of which are quite good) would step into the light. Oh, and the DOJ would have something to say as well.
No doubt just like they killed Office.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
only to those on the outside
Everyone will be on the outside when the price of watching your own media skyrockets, or your machine is scrubbed of things deemed "illegal".
...and when Microsoft has wrapped your entire world into a compendium of proprietary digital glop with no hope of improvement, only then will you realize how bad it can be.
...again.
Yeah what kind of crazy system rewards the people who invented something and gives them some control over their invention?
Hah!... however, Microsoft allowed and encouraged adoption of FAT32 for a very long time, without consequence to anyone who did so. Because of their behavior, some smart lawyer could probably make a case that FAT32 is now public domain.
The Google G1 phone uses a 2gb SanDisk micro SD card. Lets see Microsoft pick on someone its own size.
Here's a list of Companies whose products write FAT32:
They could band together now and de-fang this nonsense.
The TomTom I have carries a plain vanilla SD card. Any bets that it came from SanDisk (or wherever) already formatted with FAT32? I think SanDisk was one of the companies strong armed by Microsoft a while ago into buying a FAT32 license. Therefore, shouldn't the license to use said card transfer downstream? Or is it that nobody can write to a FAT32 partition without a further license? Microsoft will have its hands full if it's the latter - when The Planet attacks Microsoft in court like the RIAA.
I'd rather say that Standards were developing at the time - and there were certainly guidelines emanating from CERN and W3C. It really was the age of discovery with Netscape (and Sun and others including Microsoft) slowly adding functions to "the browser". The browser and server were designed to be stateless and uniform, but development and imagination were happening too slowly. I'll credit Microsoft with lighting a fire under everyone's butt. They showed the world how bad it could get if everyone sat back and waited for development to just happen. They threw a lot of resources at the Internet, but I believe the primary goal was to lock down ownership, not necessarily to improve the way things worked. The Internet as invented by Microsoft self destructed under the weight of 150,000 Windows specific viruses, irresponsible exploit vectors, the resulting spam and a host of other things that has made the Internet a dangerous place to be.
The gloves came off when Microsoft transformed their browser to be part of a client-server relationship. They provided the browser (IE), the authoring tools (Front Page) and the server technology (Server Extensions) from which to launch their proprietary communication system masquerading as an ordinary browser. Eventually, they tied all of that to their OS to make an inseparable monolithic system which nobody could really share in. They did release an SDK to build server extensions, but they certainly didn't interoperate with anything else nor reveal what was going on inside. Interoperability was not in Microsoft's interest and it left anyone not using IE on Windows trying to reverse engineer the flaming bag of shit that was handed them.
It seemed, to everyone else, that this ecosystem was designed to make competing systems look illiterate. It succeeded to such an extent that most of the corporate world believed that Microsoft was the only source for software. They had already trounced the document creation world and intended to do the same with the Internet. The Internet meant delivering commerce and private data (Passport), locking down media (Palladium), sourcing the news (MS-NBC) along with other related initiatives. The roadmap was being followed by those who understood that Microsoft wanted control of all these items in order to erect a toll booth for everyone - described in the most draconian, unflattering terms. I think the pundits were right. Microsoft wanted to gather your news, entertainment, banking and anything else they could grab, mark it up and sell it back to you. In turn, they could resell whatever they gathered back to businesses trying to reach you in the most invasive way possible.
They almost got away with it. Using a money=survival hammer on the rest of the industry didn't work so well with a shrinking group of radical, old school hackers. They gave birth to the OSS as we know it and are now thundering at the walls of Jericho.
Microsoft spent considerable effort over the years corrupting interoperability standards to favor themselves. I've got a list of things Microsoft "killed", or damaged so badly that nobody else could use it but I stumbled upon this page which really sums it up for me. It's got most of my list plus a few new ones (and I haven't even read all the chapters yet). It doesn't include things like Intel's NSP effort, which would have dramatically accelerated video on desktops (interesting to me since I'm in the Television Broadcast business). Microsoft objected to NSP, called every video hardware vendor and told them not to support it and threatened to cut anyone off who did. Details of that and a hundred similar unfriendly things are in the court transcripts somewhere.
I also recall all the "Made for Windows" stickers on everything which really meant "Incompatible with Anything Else". Some of the agreement terms included not supporting anything Microsoft deemed a competitor to t
I'm confused, would you rather be paying $50 for a browser?
Noooo Mr. Bond. My comment is only that The Browser was Netscape's only product. It didn't raise the eyebrow of Microsoft until it gained Java functionality. Microsoft's brilliant response was to suck the oxygen out of the room by giving IE away for free, including supplying it to ISPs to hand out to their customers. Down goes Netscape along with the vision of an openly interoperable, extensible future.
The IE browser was anything but free - the cost was a decade of technical stagnation, destroyed technologies and ultimately higher costs. It was the single proprietary expensive browser. From there, they could dictate which technologies we were allowed to use, replacing many superior technologies with their crudely inferior products. Microsoft employed textbook American Knowhow to knock out the competition through force of market and then essentially abandon further development. They spent more money and effort to lock everyone in to what ultimately became a contemptible ecosystem than to reinvent themselves every other year.
Was IE a better browser? Some argue that it wasn't. Microsoft was extending functionality in leaps and bounds through undocumented server plugins and quirky incompatibilities which nobody else could access. Their goal was for the Planet to see a blank screen on the Internet unless everyone was using a complete Microsoft technology chain from web site creation, through serving, all the way through viewing.
We forget that all this isn't about advancing technology, a better user experience and ease of development - it's about money. I'd prefer more open technologies to gain the upper hand, even take longer to develop, than see what we suffered for so long.
It was hard to sell a browser once IE was being given away for free. Their oxygen was cut off. Brilliant business move on the part of Microsoft. Bad for the promising new technology and shame on Microsoft for denying it to the rest of us.
Yup, Netscape and Java was buggy and ran like crap alright. With computers running at a blazing 120MHz with an astonishing 32MB of RAM, it's no wonder. But it was the seed of the idea which Microsoft correctly saw as a threat to their operating system monopoly. It had to be crushed.
Now we see Microsoft faltering as payment for years of bad behavior, soulless products, uninspired imagination (if any), refusal to interoperate and basically pitting themselves against the rest of the industry. In the face of innovations coming from outside of Microsoft, the only defense they have is to control or destroy the competition - the compelling reason to use their products (vendor lockin) is dissolving. My hat is off to what they've done in a business sense for the last few decades. I scorn them for the technologies they've killed off because they didn't exclusively get paid for them.
Actually, they murdered them for competition
That's closer to what I remember, but it was more than competition (or power), it was survival. Microsoft recognized this Java stuff running on Netscape had the potential to obviate the Windows operating system. Since Microsoft couldn't counter this technology with something more compelling than "write once, run anywhere", the best they could do was partner with Sun, then become a bull in the china shop to destroy Java from the inside.
And Java is as far from dead as possible.
Only through the force of programmers who eventually detected what Microsoft was up to. Please yip in if you have experience in this era of Visual Studio 97 and Visual Studio 6.0 and what it meant to polluting Java.
Initially, Microsoft "partnered" with Sun to embrace and develop Java. They released Visual Studio which included tools to work with Java - on Microsoft's terms. Sun quickly realized that Microsoft was targeting the Java language and the JVM for destruction and sued. Microsoft was extending Java to include Windows-only system calls, violating the agreements.
By the next year (1998), Microsoft was ordered to stop producing tools which used Sun's Java - but they continued with their own implementation (J++) which essentially extended Java but stripped away all the cross platform functionality. That was a knife in Java as intended - write once, run anywhere. By that time too many developers were using Microsoft's tools and they went along for the ride.
This is why so many people run the other way when Microsoft wants to get on board the Open Source bandwagon. Your throats are scheduled to be slit next.
Fascinating. Microsoft murdered Netscape and Java for going in this direction a decade ago and now they're writing about it like they invented the notion.
You get what you pay for... and then some.
Having run Xserves as servers since 2001 and Mac Minis as DNS servers since 2005 - without issues - all I can say is even Macs can't win against a rookie admin.
This "boycott" will be as effective and memorable as the "Save the Catholic Whales" protests. Remember those? Me either.
The Apple clones were faster. As startups, they could hand pick smaller batches of components - expecting to only build 25,000 machines at a pop. They could cherry pick an entire run of one component and design to a known tolerance for the life of the manufacturing cycle. For Apple to build 600,000 machines of one model, they'd need to lower the performance expectation to accommodate component tolerances from several runs of the same part over many months.
I think it was StarMax with a 533MHz machine when apple was shipping 400MHz. The cooling air exhaust port felt like a hair dryer, but... hey... they did it.