I’m not a big fan of Flash, and I’m not a big fan of anything by Microsoft. So why is it a good thing that Microsoft is launching a competitor product to Adobe’s Flash media application? Competition is a good thing.

Adobe’s Flash environment, fresh from the recent purchase of Macromedia, is the defacto standard in online rich media development.

Nearly every browser on every viable computing platform for the masses has a Flash plugin which makes the media moments magical with movement.

So, what does Microsoft do when a market segment has a clear leader and a near if not defacto monopoly? They launch their own version, in this case a challenge to Adobe’s Flash.

Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in and platform is called Silverlight. Get it? Flash? Silver? Flash. Silver light? Silverlight. The Redmonidans have no class when it comes to copying what belongs to someone else.

Regardless, Silverlight is likely to be a decent success in the market place, if anything, because it’ll eventually show up on every desktop of about 85% of all PCs in the world.

From what we can tell of Microsoft’s announcement and available tools, Silverlight will run on Windows and Macs. Windows XP Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer, and various flavors of Firefox.

For Mac users, either a PPC or Intel Mac, various flavors of Firefox and Safari. That covers about 98-percent of all PCs and browser usage these days.

What does Silverlight do? What does Flash do? Pretty much the same thing. It’s a platform to author media and interactive applications for the web. These would include video, audio, animation, blah, blah, blah…

In other words, competition for Adobe’s Flash monopoly. Microsoft is highlighting the fact that users will get a consistent experience on Mac or Windows, though the tools to create Silverlight media are decidedly Windows only.

In other words, to create Flash media, you can do so on Macs and Windows PCs using Adobe’s Flash. For Silverlight, it’s a Windows only proposition, though the output plays nice nice on Macs, too.

Adobe’s Flash is sufficiently capable, sufficiently embedded in the marketplace, and sufficiently ubiquitous that they’re not likely to lose quickly to Microsoft’s Silverlight. If anything, effective competition might get Adobe to soften prices, enhance features, and do those things that competition does in other product markets.

On the other hand, it could be argued that this does not bode well for the Mac and Mac users. Assume that Silverlight provides capabilities and features beyond that of Adobe’s Flash, begins to sell well, and take substantial market share from Flash?

Adobe could retaliate by cutting costs, and the end result of that could be a loss of the Flash development package for Macs. I think that unlikely, given the Mac’s growing market share, however…

In the end, good competition should create a market environment which stimulates rather than stagnates, which has been Adobe’s modus operandi for years. If Apple can stick it to Microsoft by building a better product to attract more customers, why can’t Microsoft copy the same tactic and do the same to Adobe?

Anytime the world brings me one step closer to being forced to install another Microsoft product on my Mac ... well, that can never be a good thing.

Doubloon22 - 16 April 2007 05:13 PM

Anytime the world brings me one step closer to being forced to install another Microsoft product on my Mac ... well, that can never be a good thing.

I understand the sentiment, and, on average would agree. The problem, of course, is that Adobe is the new Microsoft, both exhibiting the hubris of monopolists. Competing between themselves is fine by me. I don’t see Flash going away so that’s what I’ll continue to use. If I find I’m being locked out of certain media that’s only available in Silverbuglight, then I’ll decide whether to install the plug-in.

Carol Mary Miller - 16 April 2007 03:47 PM

I’m not a big fan of Flash, and I’m not a big fan of anything by Microsoft. So why is it a good thing that Microsoft is launching a competitor product to Adobe’s Flash media application? Competition is a good thing.

Uhh, except that Microsoft isn’t into competition. They are interested in illegally using their OS near-monopoly to create new near-monopolies. They have been convicted of that in US and EU courts (the fact that they have escaped any meaninful penalty, largely due to the wacky and inappropriate behavior of one Thomas Penfield Jackson has only emboldened them more). I’m not a big conspiracy theorist, but this falls into the “fool me one, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.” lesson in the school of hard knocks.

The only real option in the proposal of a real open web multimedia standard that anyone can develop for and that doesn’t have any proprietary “enhancements”. (Honestly, I blame Netscape for the initiation of the web tab arms race that ultimately led to their demise. I mean, who really needed a tag that made scrolling messages appear in the status bar at the bottom of the window. The fact that Internet Explorer didn’t display them was probably one of IE’s “killer app” appeal.)

Greg

Greg,
I think you’ll find that in Microsoft’s history, when it’s in their best interests, they have stepped up and put up some solid competition. The Word processing market was not always theirs, and while no doubt once a critical mass of average web users was reached there was no toppling MS’s IE, before that there was some solid (if mediocre on both sides) competition between Netscape, IE, and others. If anything I think the point is not so much that Microsoft has joined in but that Adobe will wake Flash up out of its cruft.

If Adobe’s got any sense (and I’ll submit that’s fairly debatable) they’ll fight to the ends of the earth to put Flash on top. The competition here isn’t about media players, it’s about controlling the monetization of video delivery (DRM, forced ads, etc). Personally I’d rather Flash die a slow and painful death, but I’ll take it over a MS alternative any day of the week, and then dump it for some other alternative. Let us not forget PostScript, Type One fonts, PDF, the travesty that is DNG. Adobe’s got their share of skeletons. I’d be willing to bet that MS is viewing Silverlight as a way to backdoor iTMS (MS announced it’d be Win and Mac; I’ll believe feature parity when I see it).

EnergizerE2 - 16 April 2007 10:06 PM

They are interested in illegally using their OS near-monopoly to create new near-monopolies.

How does that works? I mean, how does a company “ilegally” uses the success it has on one area in order to be succesful in another?

Ditto, actually that’s the definition of illegal monopolistic behavior. Having a Monopoly in and of itself is not illegal (just not popular), it’s when a company uses its momentum in one market to push competitors out of a new market it is entering which is considered illegal.

For instance, the EU recently found that Microsoft was trying to push video technologies out of the market and replacing them with its one, built in to the OS WMV. Now, one could argue that WMV is in fact part of the OS, but of course the point is it’s a market MS doesn’t dominate and they have historically used pressures from the OS side to effect the video market, which is what is generally considered “bad to be caught at.” If common.

It’s essentially a very complex conflict of interest scenario, for which the US has decided to give MS the benefit of the doubt (which has been documented as a bad decision, but not acted upon).

Chevalier - 17 April 2007 01:41 AM

it’s when a company uses its momentum in one market to push competitors out of a new market it is entering which is considered illegal.

But why?

the point is it’s a market MS doesn’t dominate and they have historically used pressures from the OS side to effect the video market, which is what is generally considered “bad to be caught at.” If common.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If a company has a monopoly in one area, and that allows them to expand and dominate other areas, then it is perfectly legitimate to take adventage of the oportunities. It is like saying that you cannot put your previous work experience and educational background in your resume because that would give you an “unfair” adventage over other potential candidates that want to obtain the job you are applying for.

ditto

Not exactly alike, as you won’t be working both jobs at once. I’m no lawyer but I believe the idea is merely to prevent a company from completely dominating an industry, in such a way that they control both the vertical and horizontal markets. When abstracted, monopoly abuse doesn’t sound that bad but in practice it stagnates a market and tends to prevent innovation. An excellent example of this is Internet Explorer. Microsoft coded Internet Explorer not because they expected to make money out of the deal, but to prevent Netscape from doing so and gaining a foothold in the enterprise software market. They were largely successful, and as a result when MS had clinched the win they immediately terminated IE development, probably setting back web technologies a decade.

ditto - 17 April 2007 02:08 PM

But why?

Because there are laws against it. That makes it illegal.

the point is it’s a market MS doesn’t dominate and they have historically used pressures from the OS side to effect the video market, which is what is generally considered “bad to be caught at.” If common.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If a company has a monopoly in one area, and that allows them to expand and dominate other areas, then it is perfectly legitimate to take adventage of the oportunities.

Like it or don’t, that’s exactly what makes such behavior illegal. A monopoly isn’t necessarily bad. Using a monopoly to an unfair advantage in other markets is bad. And illegal.

It is like saying that you cannot put your previous work experience and educational background in your resume because that would give you an “unfair” adventage over other potential candidates that want to obtain the job you are applying for.

A great analogy, though highly flawed, hence various and sundry laws against abuse of monopoly power. Let’s say you have a monopoly on growing corn. You grow and sell more corn than anyone else in the world, indeed, more than all other corn growers in the world put together. Now you want to get into the soy bean market. Go for it. It’s OK. Really. Except that you cannot use your position as a corn monopolist to gain market share in the soy bean market, so it’s not OK to tell the tractor manufacturers that you won’t buy their tractors and equipment if they sell to soy bean farmers. That’s abuse of power. Illegal.

Microsoft is a convicted, criminal company. Among many other things, Microsoft abused their power as the dominant OS provider by threatening PC vendors with retaliation if they sold any PCs that did not have Windows installed. How about this from Bill Gates to Michael Dell:

”Sorry, Dell. Our price for Windows is $50 per machine, for every machine you manufacture, regardless of the OS installed on it.”

See? Dell wouldn’t exist without the ability to sell Windows. Microsoft was abusing its power as the monopoly provider of the OS. Dell and everyone else caved in because they had little choice.

IBM’s OS/2 was largely considered a superior product to Windows but didn’t stand a chance because the PC vendors would not sell PCs with OS/2 installed for fear of retribution from Microsoft. The same thing took place with Microsoft Office. Vendors were “required” by Microsoft’s licensing schemes to install Office on a certain percentage of the PCs they sold, or suffer the consequences.

That behavior is illegal, but by the time the Justice Department got around to investigating and fixing it, too late—Microsoft already owned the world.

Microsoft—Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and crew—they’re evil.

Chevalier - 17 April 2007 12:50 AM

Greg,
I think you’ll find that in Microsoft’s history, when it’s in their best interests, they have stepped up and put up some solid competition. The Word processing market was not always theirs, and while no doubt once a critical mass of average web users was reached there was no toppling MS’s IE, before that there was some solid (if mediocre on both sides) competition between Netscape, IE, and others. If anything I think the point is not so much that Microsoft has joined in but that Adobe will wake Flash up out of its cruft.

Thanks for pointing out two good examples of their illegal monopolistic behaviors. Internet Exporer was one of those examples that led to their conviction. It was certainly OK to offer IE for free, but they made it mandatory and even made the audacious claim that it was impossible to remove it without destroying the functionality of the entire operating system (Uhh, it wasn’t that long ago that Windows existed without IE, yet somehow, in sworn testimony, it was not possible for Windows to exist without IE).

Here was the illegal part: It was not possible for other browser competitors to offer their browsers as the default (or even the only) browser on Windows equipped PCs. That’s what made it illegal. MS used their OS monopoly to gain an unfair advantage in another market. They didn’t win the browser market on merit, they won it by illegally using thier OS monopoly to domnate the browser market.

Contrast this to Apple and Safari. First, Apple has not monopoly on the OS. Second, Safari can be safely be deleted by simply dragging it to the trash. Third, Webkit, which is the software Safari uses to render web pages is available to other browsers, and is used by other browsers which compete with Safari.

Had MS not had an OS monpoly, or had they allowed IE to be deleted or other browsers to access the rendering engine of IE they would have been fine. But they didn’t. And now they are criminals. Though arguably unpunished criminals, but criminals nonetheless.

OK, let’s look at word processors. Word was, indeed a pioneer on the Mac (Excel, too). They were not on the PC. I have been bi-platform since about 1988, so I have a lot of perspective on both Mac and DOS/Windows platforms. Word really wasn’t any competition until Word 5.1. The tables feature was and still is, unrivaled, but there were a lot of great, innovative, word processors out there competing. My personal favorite was FullWriteby Ashton Tate (FullImpact spreadsheet was my fave spreadsheet as well). Talk about innovation, they were running a WYSIWIG word processor with page layaout capabilities (including irregular wraps around graphics) on 16MHz 68030 processors with 1MB RAM (my II cx - it may have run on lesser machines). Ashton Tate even did an awesome AppleScriptTech demo at an MacWorld in Boston showing how AppleScriptcould pull data from DBaseMac (OK, we’ll forget about that one. I owned it. Never loved it.) analyze and graph it in FullImapact and plunk it into a Full Writereport and update it in real time. It was and awsome display and showed how innovative a company could be.

Anyway, back to the story. MS was smart in cutting its teeth in the Mac GUI world. [rant on incompetence of Phillipe Khan, Lotus, and WordPerfect deleted to save space.] OK, so how did Word become the dominant word processor on the Mac? It was pretty good (at least 5.1 was), but it gained Mac dominance by becoming dominant on Windows - the de facto standard - through illegal monopolistic practices. I remember that in the early days of MS Office, Word and Excel were not even compatible with each other under Multifinder, and in the Windows version, the 3 apps had no integration and they didn’t even have the same keyboard shortcuts for common actions like “Save” and “Print”. In short, they didn’t innovate anything other than bundling 3 unrelated apps for the price of 2.

OK, really not a heinous crime, so why were they convicted of illegal monopolistic practices? One factor was that the Office team had access to info about Windows that other sofware developers didn’t. Office could take advantage of unpublished features of the OS that were not available to other application developers. This is the crux of an ongoing dispute with the EU, though in the context of server sofware. The EU wants MS to make available to other developers information that would allow them to interact with MS servers the same way as MS apps do. Different example, same principle.

If you are having a hard time imagining the illegal part, think of how things would be different if Windows and Office were made by different companies. Windows would be giving the same info to all developers, because they would want as many developers as possible to make kick-ass apps. Everyone would be competing on a level field. With MS making both Windows and Office, they gave some info to the Office team that wasn’t available to other developers because they wanted to have a monopoly in Office apps, as well as OS. In short, other developers did not have the same chance to make kick-ass apps as MS did. That’s what’s illegal. Same goes for the MediaPlayer arena, which is also a bone of contention in the EU.

MS even testified (under oath) at one point, when it was to their advantage, that there was a “Chinese wall” between Office and Windows teams. Later, when faced with the prospect of a breakup, they testified (under oath) that the breaking the interrelationship between the Office and Windows teams would ruin the software. Likewise, at one time they testified (under oath) that there was no advantage to develop both the OS and Office apps. Later, when they dropped IE for the Mac, the claimed (in press release), that Apple had an inherent advantage in developing both, so they could not compete. I’m surprised that they have never been prosecuted for perjury.

Anyway, I’m out of space.

Greg

EnergizerE2 - 17 April 2007 07:33 PM

Anyway, I’m out of space.

RonnieMac, if you are reading this:

1) Thanks for putting a limit on post lengths. It may have saved my marriage.
2) There is a bug in the character counter. When it got to 0 and I tried to post, it said I was over by 28 characters.
3) Can you give me credit for like 47 extra posts for this one? Unless it totally sucked and I accept a penalty of 47, which would mean I’d have to make a bunch just to get my ranking back up to Nubee.

Greg

EnergizerE2 - 17 April 2007 07:41 PM

RonnieMac, if you are reading this:

Always. Every post. Every day. Yours are good.

1) Thanks for putting a limit on post lengths. It may have saved my marriage.

We’ve had to adjust it a few times here and there… mostly when Tera would rant on about something and go over the limit…

2) There is a bug in the character counter. When it got to 0 and I tried to post, it said I was over by 28 characters.

I’ll be sure to credit your membership fee.

3) Can you give me credit for like 47 extra posts for this one? Unless it totally sucked and I accept a penalty of 47, which would mean I’d have to make a bunch just to get my ranking back up to Nubee. You’re stuck at Buddy.

I’ve credited your account accordingly, unfortunately the systems are separate so there’s no way to move you back ‘up’ to Nubee.

PS - I agree: Microsoft is an evil company.

Adobe once tried to take some of Flash’s market with, I believe it was called, LiveMotion.  I used it. It wasn’t bad. Where is that now? Microsoft once tried to take part of the documentmarket from Acrobat. I don’t even remember what their product was called, but we all use pdf so it doesn’t matter. Corel Painter was once a viable competitor to Photoshop. Now it’s an also ran the way Word Perfect is an also ran. Oh, and GoLive was actually a good web editor but couldn’t gain traction against the established Dreamweaver.

It’s hard to unseat an established product, especially one that is so widely adopted and of high quality. Zune anyone? I just don’t see Microsoft taking a big chunk out of the Flash market unless Adobe totally screws up. And Microsoft may have once created superior products but its corporate culture no longer seems conducive to that. Vista is here and has had enormous resources poured into it. Anybody rushing to buy it? Office 2007?

And that 85% IE market share Carol mentioned is actually below 75% now and falling monthly in the US. It’s below 70% in Europe and Australia. There’s another arena in which Microsoft has shown us it doesn’t even play catch up well, web browsers. It’s losing market share in internet web servers too, and has steadily for over a dozen years. The only place where it has any clout is in corporate networks and intranets, hardly the place where Flash like video is in high demand.

Ten yeas ago Microsoft might have had a chance, but Flash is too well entrenched and has too many trained developers already using it, and Microsoft has lost much of it’s ability to innovate or produce relevant products in a timely manner. Microsoft is still skilled at leveraging its monopoly position in markets it already dominates. It doesn’t seem to do well at carving out market share when it needs to actually compete, at least not since it won the first browser wars last century. Keep in mind how steadily MSN Search is losing ground to Google. I can’t see Adobe management losing any sleep whatsoever over Microsoft’s Flash competition.

Ironically Apple’s Safari enjoys many of the same benefits that IE does on windows. The benefit is the “default” status; most users never get around to altering the defaults.

Michael: how long has Dreamweaver been on the market? GoLive’s been around for quite some time, I would be surprised if Dreamweaver was established before its debut. You are spot on re the vast inertia caused with a lot of these technologies and familiarity/training. The advantage Microsoft has that others don’t re Flash, though, is that if Microsoft pre-installs it on all machines and pushes it through their update download app they can very rapidly have a large install base for content. Of course, to gain traction with developers they then have to provide some sort of production convenience/way to make more money.

ditto - 17 April 2007 01:16 AM

EnergizerE2 - 16 April 2007 10:06 PM

They are interested in illegally using their OS near-monopoly to create new near-monopolies.

How does that works? I mean, how does a company “ilegally” uses the success it has on one area in order to be succesful in another?

See Judge Jackson’s findings of fact in the Microsoft antitrust trial.