No, enterprise customers by and large don't give a crap about being on the bleeding edge. They do care, however, about getting timely security patches for as long as they use the product, which is usually a very very long time.
People that don't use (or never learned to use) OS X can't imagine why people praise it. If you really think OS X feels 15 years old, then you really never mastered it. To me it feels light years ahead of Windows 7 still. MS copied, but as usual copied badly. Windows still feels like an old clunker with bolted on patch solutions, that just don't flow together. OS X is simple beauty and so easy to drive (just look at Spotlight vs Windows Search and how clunky it feels compared to Spotlight).
Really? sounds to me as if you just never really mastered Windows 7;)
Only in the sense that PCs constitute a tiny, almost negligible part of the entirety of computers.
No, even among PCs 'gamers' are a tiny minority. For each WoW player there's a hundred people playing Solitaire, and for each MW2 player there's a thousand who've never gone beyond Minesweeper. Just look at ATI and NVidia's sales and compare them to sales of desktops PCs if you don't believe me, gamers are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
This is part of the problem. In order to get GNU/Linux* out of the corporate ghetto, it needs more applications that make it attractive to home users.
Problem? corporate users are the ones with the money and the power, there is no 'problem;. You probably weren't in the industry during the '80s, because if you were you'd know that Windows got to where it is because of DOS, and DOS got to where it was because it (for various circumstances) dominated the corporate world, and when employees decided on buying a computer, they decided to go with what they already knew and would run their apps from work.
Hell, ask any 'old-school' gamer of the kind that grew up with Ataris and Commodores about the state of DOS gaming back then. DOS succeeded in *spite* of gamers, not because of them.
Erm, were you talking about this Sage? because my initial reaction to your post was "WTF is this guy talking about, Sage was made for Linux from the beginning", so I googled just in case.
I know I'm calling forth the anger of a thousand 15-year-old ricer kiddies with this, but seriously. Gamers constitute a tiny, almost negligible part of the entirety of computer users, and nearly zero percent of corporate users who are Linux's main customers.
The rest of your points are just arguing to try to seem less wrong. The fact that you can play through TCP/IP has nothing to do with my point. It had to do with tearing apart your horrible analogy. You couldn't address that so you countered with something irrelevant and not even accurate.
Let's see. You: bnetd only existed so pirates could play online. Me: pirates could play online without bnetd. Yep, nothing to do with your point at all.
Yes, legality is different than morality. But just saying a cliche statement is meaningless. Stealing people's art assets and copying gameplay is morally wrong. So I agree that it was both moral and legal to shut them down.
They didn't steal anything. Much like the hundreds of Doom engines out there, you needed to provide your copies of the original files to play them, FreeCraft was just an engine.
Like I said, if any of the insane things happen, I'll admit I am wrong. But they won't so I'm not worried.
And your own, unfounded opinion is supposed to demonstrate Blizzard isn't evil? you need a better argument.
No, it isn't. I responded to all the points the parent poster listed as making them evil and why I didn't think it was evil. But nothing like starting out your argument with a strawman, right?
So why mention it, if it has no bearing on whether they're evil or not?
BitTorrent is a horrible analogy. BitTorrent simply is a fast way to transfer files among peers. The tool is inherently neutral even if many uses are illegal. bnetd was designed to bypass protection on proprietary code so that people could play online without paying for the game. Even if you want to say that it was designed only to give people better online performance (weak at best considered how it was used), the fact that it was doing it for proprietary code is the difference between bnetd and BitTorrent. If BitTorrent only transferred files based off of someone else's code, then maybe you would have a point. But it doesn't, so you don't.
Wrong. You could already play online with a pirated copy of Starcraft and Diablo 2 thanks to the wonders of LAN and direct TCP/IP play (why did you think they took it out for SC2?). All bnetd did was to allow people to run their own Battle.net-like servers for running a private league or such, something that had a lot of interest not just from the 'pirate' crowd but from legit owners as well.
That's great for Valve (another company that is awesome). But if Blizzard doesn't want other people using their assets, IT IS THEIR RIGHT TO DO SO. Why can't people write their own code and make their own art? Slashdot props up originality but then defends people who want to steal the ideas, art, and code from other games to make a game exactly like the original (except that it is usually worse) instead of coming up with their own ideas. In any case, you may not like it. But companies have the right to defend their property. It doesn't make them evil.
Yes, it does. That a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean the act itself is automatically "non-evil", legality is independant of morality. And suing your own fans because they tried to port their favorite (and quite ancient) game to Linux and make a couple improvements on the way *is* evil by almost any definition of the word.
Tin foil hattery. Call me when this is used in all the BS ways Slashdotter say it COULD be used. They will be shot down. Also, this is a problem with the legal system. If there was a simple way for Blizzard to say "Hey, Glider needs to be shut down because it is doing this..." and it was reasonable (which it was) then it could have just been shut down. Our legal system is so screwed up that they had to jump through hoops to get Glider to shut down. Also, no one blames Glider. If it wasn't created in the first place, then this wouldn't have happened. I understand why you don't like Blizzard because of it, but it doesn't make them evil.
And you know it'll be shot down for a fact... why, exactly? And yes, expanding the reaches of EULAs and copyright law beyond the limits that came before it is pretty much "evil" as well.
Uh, no. MS does break monopolistic laws all the time. That is why they are evil. Their actions are not reasonable.
This game is going to sell in the millions. Talking about this stuff is not going to stop anyone from buying it. I'd like to get on games.slashdot.org and talk about games. But you guys politicize everything. I feel like Slashdot becomes a bunch of Fox News watchers when it comes to Blizzard. There is this positive feedback loop that mods up people that hate Blizzard but then ignore the millions of times more evil companies like Apple and Nintendo. Can't you guys just be excited for a new good game? No, I guess not.
Apple and Nintendo can't be evil, they made the iPod and the Wii respectively and they're great. Seriously, you may try to get away from politics, but politics certainly won't leave you alone, and if you don't actively protest companies that behave unethically, that's exactly how they'll continue to behave.
Splitting something in 3 equal parts isn't any easier than doing it in 5. Face it, if 'ease of eyeballing' was paramount for our units, we'd be using binary (or more likely octal) just like our computers.
Ridiculous. What other company still supports servers for a 10+ year old game? What other company ignores release pressures and won't release a game until it is done? Evil my ass.
So that's all it takes for you to deem a company 'non-evil'? Windows still supports 10-years-old OSes and ignores release pressures to release software before it's done, are they a good company too?
But let's talk about bnetd. Bnetd was where people went to play pirated copies of Starcraft. You can argue some minority of people owned the game and preferred playing. But the reality is, that is where people who didn't pay for the game played. If you owned a company, I am sure you would shut down anyone who did the same to you. This is where some people argue "But the bnetd people said they would do key checks if Blizzard would give them their key gen algorithm". And this is where I look at them funny for being so stupid. Do you really think a company would hand that over to some random people. Give me a break.
BitTorrent is where 'people go to get pirated copies of MPAA movies', yet is that sufficient reason to shut them down? no, because BitTorrent is not, by itself, illegal. And neither was bnetd, regardless of what your RIAA-like red herrings may suggest.
Never even heard of Freecraft. Sounds like Blizzard didn't like the name association and its copying of Warcraft's idea. So they changed the name and actually tried to make a unique game instead of copying. Sounds find to me.
Yeah, except the part where they also had to remove compatibility with Warcraft II's files to avoid getting sued. That's how the whole freaking project *started*, btw, as a way to play an improved version of Warcraft II. Somebody does that to ID's games and they give it their kudos. Somebody does that to Valve's games and they freaking advertise it on their website. Somebody does that to *Blizzard*, however, and here comes the lawyers.
As far as Glider is concerned...are you serious? Bots ruin MMOs. People running Glider were getting banned since you had to dig around on the site to even know that it was something that violated the ToS. It was an application made EXPLICITLY to do something that would get you banned. There was absolutely no other application of Glider but to cheat. It deserved to be shut down and was something that benefited people who actually played the game.
Did it deserve to be shut down? perhaps. Did it deserve to be shut down by the bullshit copyright and EULA claims Blizzard used? hardly. Did we, people who had nothing to do with the whole thing, deserve to gain such an incredibly dangerous legal precedent over it? hell fucking no. Yet that's what happened.
You can not like them for doing these things, but you have to realize from a business perspective it is all completely logical. Companies have to protect their IP. If you counter balance this with the fact that they still support and update really really old games and that they make some of the best games ever, you can't really hate them without looking like some sort of hyper-polarized buffoon.
"Business perspective" has a way of making otherwise evil acts seem completely logical. Hell, nothing Microsoft has ever done has been illogical from a strictly business perspective, specially given their current size and power, yet we're perfectly fine with calling them a bunch of evil motherfuckers. Also, the 'best games ever' thing is purely subjective and, therefore, fails at being a decent enough argument.
I am not trying to convince you to buy their games. I am just saying, you aren't going to change my mind with those examples since they are all justified by any reasonable person.
"Popular" is subjective. I even consider Opera to be such, but there's no inherent contradiction in those that don't consider IE6 to be worth caring for.
Agreed. If they were going to shamelessly copy the UI of another program, at least they could've chosen one that didn't suck, like Xara, instead of the piece of trash that is Photoshop.
Or what, do you think there'd be such a huge market for tutorials and 'tricks' in both video and book form for Photoshop if it were even half as easy to use as people pretend it to be? "Photoshop for dummies"-style books outnumber Excel ones at least 3:1 everywhere I look, and God knows the only thing manager types don't do in Excel is playing Solitaire so popularity ain't it.
You're not "supposed" to care, it's just that a lot of us do as result of him being a celebrity among geeks. Besides, his viewpoint is more likely to be closer to ours, as a fellow geek, than that of Steve Jobs or any such marketeer that gets published by pop media.
This article certainly raised *my* interest in the Nexus One. Not enough to buy it blindly, but at least give it some consideration along with the N900 I was eyeing before.
The purpose of writing software is to serve your users.
But the process of writing software doesn't happen without developers. And the messier and kludgier a codebase is, the harder it is to get devs to work on it.
Sorry, but if you want devs to support Apple OSes for a longer time, you should ask Apple to provide a more stable platform rather than change it every year and a half just because they can.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? local web hosting services suck because none of them offers Ruby and/or Rails in their low-cost packages.
Yeah, yeah, grandma won't care whose fault it is when she can't run her knitting patterns e-store, but put the blame where its due. It's not Rails' fault that web hosting services won't offer a language worth shit unless you pay for the priviledge.
The internet is not the greatest thing in the past hundred years of mass communications;
Yes. Yes it is. You're only deluding yourself if you believe any of the other inventions you named allowed the 'masses' to communicate massively, rather than merely the rich and the powerful.
Furthermore, economics is not a science (more like a witch doctor or high priest.)
Economics is at *least* as much of a science as Psychology and Sociology are. And no, you can't judge its accuracy by the results of what politicians have done in its name, much like you can't judge the validity of a Physics paper by reading the report about its findings on your local newspaper.
Ever used Photoshop? Illustrator? Acrobat? *any* other Adobe app besides Flash?
Large and resource-rich companies like Adobe tend to be driven by their marketing team rather than engineers, so their software tends to be a huge, bloated mess that generally does what you need, along with a hundred other features that look nice on paper but you'll never use within your lifetime and have never been optimized because the engineers are too busy hacking together feature #101, as John from marketing demanded.
Though given how awful iTunes and Quicktime run on Windows, I don't know whether Steve Jobs has any right to call others lazy.
You got it wrong. IF all browser vendors could agree on a video codec for HTML5, then Adobe Flash will die. Otherwise, we'll be in the same mess we're in 10 years from now, because it's easier to rely on Flash than going back to guessing what codec the user's OS/browser combination supports.
...If Amazon can dictate terms to book publishers in this fashion, do you think that Apple could pull a similar stunt with RIAA members?
If the RIAA members weren't previously colluded in the organization we call the RIAA, yeah. As it stands, it comes down to who's the biggest monopoly (or oligopoly, in the RIAA's case), and the music industry is far bigger than the online music distribution industry so Apple's fucked.
You're making the same mistake as the people on the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD 'fight'. It's not about who has a bigger share, but whether either has a share comparable to that which came before it. And face it, h.264+HTML5 was designed to *replace* h.264+flash, so the prevalence of the latter isn't a testament to the former's triumph, so to speak, but rather of the exact opposite.
If h.264 wrapped in flash continues being the de-facto standard of the web, then we have won nothing. And that's exactly what's going to happen if Apple continues to refuse Theora, for the reasons I've already explained.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. Enough free time that you can reasonably spend most of it in mindless chit-chat is the exact definition of utopia.
No, enterprise customers by and large don't give a crap about being on the bleeding edge. They do care, however, about getting timely security patches for as long as they use the product, which is usually a very very long time.
People that don't use (or never learned to use) OS X can't imagine why people praise it. If you really think OS X feels 15 years old, then you really never mastered it. To me it feels light years ahead of Windows 7 still. MS copied, but as usual copied badly. Windows still feels like an old clunker with bolted on patch solutions, that just don't flow together. OS X is simple beauty and so easy to drive (just look at Spotlight vs Windows Search and how clunky it feels compared to Spotlight).
Really? sounds to me as if you just never really mastered Windows 7 ;)
Only in the sense that PCs constitute a tiny, almost negligible part of the entirety of computers.
No, even among PCs 'gamers' are a tiny minority. For each WoW player there's a hundred people playing Solitaire, and for each MW2 player there's a thousand who've never gone beyond Minesweeper. Just look at ATI and NVidia's sales and compare them to sales of desktops PCs if you don't believe me, gamers are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
This is part of the problem. In order to get GNU/Linux* out of the corporate ghetto, it needs more applications that make it attractive to home users.
Problem? corporate users are the ones with the money and the power, there is no 'problem;. You probably weren't in the industry during the '80s, because if you were you'd know that Windows got to where it is because of DOS, and DOS got to where it was because it (for various circumstances) dominated the corporate world, and when employees decided on buying a computer, they decided to go with what they already knew and would run their apps from work.
Hell, ask any 'old-school' gamer of the kind that grew up with Ataris and Commodores about the state of DOS gaming back then. DOS succeeded in *spite* of gamers, not because of them.
Erm, were you talking about this Sage? because my initial reaction to your post was "WTF is this guy talking about, Sage was made for Linux from the beginning", so I googled just in case.
Because there's no need for it.
I know I'm calling forth the anger of a thousand 15-year-old ricer kiddies with this, but seriously. Gamers constitute a tiny, almost negligible part of the entirety of computer users, and nearly zero percent of corporate users who are Linux's main customers.
The rest of your points are just arguing to try to seem less wrong. The fact that you can play through TCP/IP has nothing to do with my point. It had to do with tearing apart your horrible analogy. You couldn't address that so you countered with something irrelevant and not even accurate.
Let's see. You: bnetd only existed so pirates could play online. Me: pirates could play online without bnetd. Yep, nothing to do with your point at all.
Yes, legality is different than morality. But just saying a cliche statement is meaningless. Stealing people's art assets and copying gameplay is morally wrong. So I agree that it was both moral and legal to shut them down.
They didn't steal anything. Much like the hundreds of Doom engines out there, you needed to provide your copies of the original files to play them, FreeCraft was just an engine.
Like I said, if any of the insane things happen, I'll admit I am wrong. But they won't so I'm not worried.
And your own, unfounded opinion is supposed to demonstrate Blizzard isn't evil? you need a better argument.
No, it isn't. I responded to all the points the parent poster listed as making them evil and why I didn't think it was evil. But nothing like starting out your argument with a strawman, right?
So why mention it, if it has no bearing on whether they're evil or not?
BitTorrent is a horrible analogy. BitTorrent simply is a fast way to transfer files among peers. The tool is inherently neutral even if many uses are illegal. bnetd was designed to bypass protection on proprietary code so that people could play online without paying for the game. Even if you want to say that it was designed only to give people better online performance (weak at best considered how it was used), the fact that it was doing it for proprietary code is the difference between bnetd and BitTorrent. If BitTorrent only transferred files based off of someone else's code, then maybe you would have a point. But it doesn't, so you don't.
Wrong. You could already play online with a pirated copy of Starcraft and Diablo 2 thanks to the wonders of LAN and direct TCP/IP play (why did you think they took it out for SC2?). All bnetd did was to allow people to run their own Battle.net-like servers for running a private league or such, something that had a lot of interest not just from the 'pirate' crowd but from legit owners as well.
That's great for Valve (another company that is awesome). But if Blizzard doesn't want other people using their assets, IT IS THEIR RIGHT TO DO SO. Why can't people write their own code and make their own art? Slashdot props up originality but then defends people who want to steal the ideas, art, and code from other games to make a game exactly like the original (except that it is usually worse) instead of coming up with their own ideas. In any case, you may not like it. But companies have the right to defend their property. It doesn't make them evil.
Yes, it does. That a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean the act itself is automatically "non-evil", legality is independant of morality. And suing your own fans because they tried to port their favorite (and quite ancient) game to Linux and make a couple improvements on the way *is* evil by almost any definition of the word.
Tin foil hattery. Call me when this is used in all the BS ways Slashdotter say it COULD be used. They will be shot down. Also, this is a problem with the legal system. If there was a simple way for Blizzard to say "Hey, Glider needs to be shut down because it is doing this..." and it was reasonable (which it was) then it could have just been shut down. Our legal system is so screwed up that they had to jump through hoops to get Glider to shut down. Also, no one blames Glider. If it wasn't created in the first place, then this wouldn't have happened. I understand why you don't like Blizzard because of it, but it doesn't make them evil.
And you know it'll be shot down for a fact... why, exactly? And yes, expanding the reaches of EULAs and copyright law beyond the limits that came before it is pretty much "evil" as well.
Uh, no. MS does break monopolistic laws all the time. That is why they are evil. Their actions are not reasonable.
This game is going to sell in the millions. Talking about this stuff is not going to stop anyone from buying it. I'd like to get on games.slashdot.org and talk about games. But you guys politicize everything. I feel like Slashdot becomes a bunch of Fox News watchers when it comes to Blizzard. There is this positive feedback loop that mods up people that hate Blizzard but then ignore the millions of times more evil companies like Apple and Nintendo. Can't you guys just be excited for a new good game? No, I guess not.
Apple and Nintendo can't be evil, they made the iPod and the Wii respectively and they're great. Seriously, you may try to get away from politics, but politics certainly won't leave you alone, and if you don't actively protest companies that behave unethically, that's exactly how they'll continue to behave.
Bread and circuses indeed.
Splitting something in 3 equal parts isn't any easier than doing it in 5. Face it, if 'ease of eyeballing' was paramount for our units, we'd be using binary (or more likely octal) just like our computers.
Ridiculous. What other company still supports servers for a 10+ year old game? What other company ignores release pressures and won't release a game until it is done? Evil my ass.
So that's all it takes for you to deem a company 'non-evil'? Windows still supports 10-years-old OSes and ignores release pressures to release software before it's done, are they a good company too?
But let's talk about bnetd. Bnetd was where people went to play pirated copies of Starcraft. You can argue some minority of people owned the game and preferred playing. But the reality is, that is where people who didn't pay for the game played. If you owned a company, I am sure you would shut down anyone who did the same to you. This is where some people argue "But the bnetd people said they would do key checks if Blizzard would give them their key gen algorithm". And this is where I look at them funny for being so stupid. Do you really think a company would hand that over to some random people. Give me a break.
BitTorrent is where 'people go to get pirated copies of MPAA movies', yet is that sufficient reason to shut them down? no, because BitTorrent is not, by itself, illegal. And neither was bnetd, regardless of what your RIAA-like red herrings may suggest.
Never even heard of Freecraft. Sounds like Blizzard didn't like the name association and its copying of Warcraft's idea. So they changed the name and actually tried to make a unique game instead of copying. Sounds find to me.
Yeah, except the part where they also had to remove compatibility with Warcraft II's files to avoid getting sued. That's how the whole freaking project *started*, btw, as a way to play an improved version of Warcraft II. Somebody does that to ID's games and they give it their kudos. Somebody does that to Valve's games and they freaking advertise it on their website. Somebody does that to *Blizzard*, however, and here comes the lawyers.
As far as Glider is concerned...are you serious? Bots ruin MMOs. People running Glider were getting banned since you had to dig around on the site to even know that it was something that violated the ToS. It was an application made EXPLICITLY to do something that would get you banned. There was absolutely no other application of Glider but to cheat. It deserved to be shut down and was something that benefited people who actually played the game.
Did it deserve to be shut down? perhaps. Did it deserve to be shut down by the bullshit copyright and EULA claims Blizzard used? hardly. Did we, people who had nothing to do with the whole thing, deserve to gain such an incredibly dangerous legal precedent over it? hell fucking no. Yet that's what happened.
You can not like them for doing these things, but you have to realize from a business perspective it is all completely logical. Companies have to protect their IP. If you counter balance this with the fact that they still support and update really really old games and that they make some of the best games ever, you can't really hate them without looking like some sort of hyper-polarized buffoon.
"Business perspective" has a way of making otherwise evil acts seem completely logical. Hell, nothing Microsoft has ever done has been illogical from a strictly business perspective, specially given their current size and power, yet we're perfectly fine with calling them a bunch of evil motherfuckers. Also, the 'best games ever' thing is purely subjective and, therefore, fails at being a decent enough argument.
I am not trying to convince you to buy their games. I am just saying, you aren't going to change my mind with those examples since they are all justified by any reasonable person.
Not really, they aren't.
Just say no to a company that likes suing their own fans to the ground and directly expanded the reach of EULAs in the United States.
DRM, LAN, they're all just the nip in the proverbial bud of Blizzard's evil, reasons to boycott them we've had for years now.
Ideally, yes. Sadly idiots like their pretty crap, and idiots outnumber reasonable folk by a huge margin, hence big-ass advertising and 1 MB webpages.
"Popular" is subjective. I even consider Opera to be such, but there's no inherent contradiction in those that don't consider IE6 to be worth caring for.
In many countries spying results in the death penalty, why not in this case?
Because the US is still trying to maintain the illusion that they hold a greater respect for human rights than those other countries.
Agreed. If they were going to shamelessly copy the UI of another program, at least they could've chosen one that didn't suck, like Xara, instead of the piece of trash that is Photoshop.
Or what, do you think there'd be such a huge market for tutorials and 'tricks' in both video and book form for Photoshop if it were even half as easy to use as people pretend it to be? "Photoshop for dummies"-style books outnumber Excel ones at least 3:1 everywhere I look, and God knows the only thing manager types don't do in Excel is playing Solitaire so popularity ain't it.
You're not "supposed" to care, it's just that a lot of us do as result of him being a celebrity among geeks. Besides, his viewpoint is more likely to be closer to ours, as a fellow geek, than that of Steve Jobs or any such marketeer that gets published by pop media.
This article certainly raised *my* interest in the Nexus One. Not enough to buy it blindly, but at least give it some consideration along with the N900 I was eyeing before.
The purpose of writing software is to serve your users.
But the process of writing software doesn't happen without developers. And the messier and kludgier a codebase is, the harder it is to get devs to work on it.
Sorry, but if you want devs to support Apple OSes for a longer time, you should ask Apple to provide a more stable platform rather than change it every year and a half just because they can.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? local web hosting services suck because none of them offers Ruby and/or Rails in their low-cost packages.
Yeah, yeah, grandma won't care whose fault it is when she can't run her knitting patterns e-store, but put the blame where its due. It's not Rails' fault that web hosting services won't offer a language worth shit unless you pay for the priviledge.
The internet is not the greatest thing in the past hundred years of mass communications;
Yes. Yes it is. You're only deluding yourself if you believe any of the other inventions you named allowed the 'masses' to communicate massively, rather than merely the rich and the powerful.
Furthermore, economics is not a science (more like a witch doctor or high priest.)
Economics is at *least* as much of a science as Psychology and Sociology are. And no, you can't judge its accuracy by the results of what politicians have done in its name, much like you can't judge the validity of a Physics paper by reading the report about its findings on your local newspaper.
Ever used Photoshop? Illustrator? Acrobat? *any* other Adobe app besides Flash?
Large and resource-rich companies like Adobe tend to be driven by their marketing team rather than engineers, so their software tends to be a huge, bloated mess that generally does what you need, along with a hundred other features that look nice on paper but you'll never use within your lifetime and have never been optimized because the engineers are too busy hacking together feature #101, as John from marketing demanded.
Though given how awful iTunes and Quicktime run on Windows, I don't know whether Steve Jobs has any right to call others lazy.
You got it wrong. IF all browser vendors could agree on a video codec for HTML5, then Adobe Flash will die. Otherwise, we'll be in the same mess we're in 10 years from now, because it's easier to rely on Flash than going back to guessing what codec the user's OS/browser combination supports.
...If Amazon can dictate terms to book publishers in this fashion, do you think that Apple could pull a similar stunt with RIAA members?
If the RIAA members weren't previously colluded in the organization we call the RIAA, yeah. As it stands, it comes down to who's the biggest monopoly (or oligopoly, in the RIAA's case), and the music industry is far bigger than the online music distribution industry so Apple's fucked.
You're making the same mistake as the people on the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD 'fight'. It's not about who has a bigger share, but whether either has a share comparable to that which came before it. And face it, h.264+HTML5 was designed to *replace* h.264+flash, so the prevalence of the latter isn't a testament to the former's triumph, so to speak, but rather of the exact opposite.
If h.264 wrapped in flash continues being the de-facto standard of the web, then we have won nothing. And that's exactly what's going to happen if Apple continues to refuse Theora, for the reasons I've already explained.
Nobody cared when they started bundling the .NET framework with Vista and now 7, so I can't see why they'd care for Silverlight with IE.