Michael, that's easy: I would judge you on your actions. For my part, many (that would be MANY) moons ago I was a journalist for a Windows magazine and later, purchased over a quarter of a million dollars in Microsoft licences; in both ways I helped build their monopolies. I can't even say I didn't know there was cheating back then; I saw the first conclusive proof of undocumented system calls by Excel in 1993. Back then, I thought it was great that IBM's stranglehold on the industry was being challenged and that unfair competition was not too high a price to pay for a common platform.
People at Microsoft are used to distrust and resentment, although generally speaking they ascribe that to jealousy of success and not Microsoft's actions. For many years working against standards for commercial gain was just the way things were done unless there was mutual recognition that more opportunities would come from standards support. Remember IPX/SPX? I remember how a little company called Adobe got the idea to distribute a free reader for their portable document format (one of four in the market at that time) from a smaller and fiercer competitor taking market share, Farallon. Adobe won that war and buried Farallon, but it took them many years to seek ISO standardisation for PDF and the world is better off for it. (Of course, Microsoft can't stand it, they won't support PDF and they want to attack Adobe with Windows-only XPS. So much for Microsoft interoperability.) When Mr. Huggers says he is proud of his work at Microsoft which included blocking open standards, concerns about conflict of interest are justified. Those concerns can be allayed by promoting open standards. Of course, that means dropping Windows Media (which means dropping Microsoft DRM). Can a former executive promoting Windows Media be reasonably expected to reverse a decision to use Windows Media? I say give him the benefit of the doubt, but for how long? There is still no download support for iPlayer outside of Windows. What will he propose? No one is better positioned than he to enlarge WM Player's usefulness by negotiating Dirac support in WM Player, either natively, in a branded player, or as a standalone codec installer. Sean. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
