> People talk about this being a "war," but it doesn't have to be.
Perhaps, but when Microsoft saw a threat to its desktop monopoly in the Netscape browser, it decided to "cut off its air supply." When it saw a threat to its media empire in QuickTime, it wanted to "knife the baby", according to court proceedings. IOW, the players in this "war" are not signing Kumbaya. After Microsoft cut off Netscape's air supply, it achieved its goal of impeding progress on browser development for five extremely long years. Only after Firefox, Opera and Safari declared war on IE that we saw Microsoft show any signs of interest in web browsers again. Just as IE is strategic to MS and Flash to Adobe, so is Safari to Apple, which I explored in: Runtime wars (2): Apple's answer to Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX<http://counternotions.com/2007/11/15/apple-runtime-answer-2/> Apple's "war" against Flash is to not allow its own platform to be controlled/intimidated by an adversarial vendor, like MS did with its Office suite. That Apple chose to do this not with another proprietary format like Flash but largely on open source WebKit is commendable. > That's the paradigm that must change before consistent progress can > be made. In the U.S. we have a market economy and an adversarial legal system pitting sides against each other. I am not aware of any Republic of Kumbaya that has been able to remotely challenge the rate of progress or innovation that we have here. > The existence of cows does not depend on the non-existence > of horses. While balance may be ideal, a species can wipe out another within the same territory, as we see in nature all the time. Ask Netscape. While it's trying to establish the iPhone as the next mobile platform, what benefit would it be for Apple to allow into the mix a common-denominator runtime, with different interaction patterns, non-native interface controls and a glaring absence of a multi-touch UI framework, all from a vendor that's in direct competition with it? Apple's not in the business of selling kitchen sinks. -- Kontra http://counternotions.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
