Hi J-S, On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Jean-Sébastien Guay <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Robert, > >> Competing standards are a bad thing as it breaks interoperability and >> divides the market place into targeting one or other, or both >> standards. > > I understand your points, but I don't see how that's different from any > market... I could give lots of examples of similar competition: Mac vs > Windows vs Linux,
No, you just don't get it. There isn't free market competition between OpenGL and Direct3D. Microsoft is a MONOPOLY, it's been found guilty of abusing it's monopoly position in several markets segments across several continents. Because of Microsoft's monopoly position and complete control of the Windows platforms it uses it's leverage to control those who develop the competiting technology - all the hardware vendors that contribute to OpenGL also have to jump to Microsoft's demands, they run a tightrope between not pissing off Microsoft and loosing software vendors that use OpenGL. Even you're suggestion of a free market competation between Windows vs Linux vs OSX is well off make. Microsoft has hardware vendors uses it's monopoly position vigorously here as well, only completely non Windows manufacture can safely promote a non Windows operating system, this meens OSX and the small vendors like Jeremey's company that builds Linux boxes. > I don't see how we can do anything to change that, we just have to accept it > and try to drive OpenGL to take DirectX's market share (which is what we're > trying to do, of course). Putting blinkers on when it comes to see the dynamics is not helpful, to know how best to be effective you have to understand what is really going on. There is not free market comptetion when it comes to Direct3D vs OpenGL. The hardware vendors are stuck with a very rich and powerful monopoly on one hand pushing Direct3D very hard and trying to crush OpenGL, and and a set of software vendors and on the other hand sticking to OpenGL. The only hardware vendors that might be a position to really push OpenGL is Apple doesn't, instead just behaves like a consumer of OpenGL more than a driver, perhaps because it just reuses graphics hardware components, rather than being an actual manufacturer. Perhaps if Apple was bothered about gaming it might be different, rather than multi-media - you'll notice that they did come up with and has pushed OpenCL which really is great for multi-media processing. So, first up know the underlying dyamics of the market. We have to work doubly hard to overcome the hold that Microsoft has over the hardware vendors. We have to make it more painful not to properly support OpenGL than the pressure that Microsoft can exert, and we have to make it more rewarding to properly support OpenGL than the rewards that Microsoft can provide. We can't provide direct money incentives, but we can offer killer apps that require OpenGL, and we can offer positive marketing opportunities for those that support our apps well, and we can provide negative marketing for those that don't. Given the killer app for graphics on the PC right now is firmly games, which MS has captured very well, we have to come up with either new great games that are OpenGL only or a new breed of killer graphics app. This is a challenge to come up with. Until we have a killer or set of killer apps we have to work with calling attention to our apps that are very important to smaller market segments. It's a less compelling angle, but it's what we have to work with. Our own community is pretty big, so we might be able to illustrate that OpenGL is really useful to a wide range of smaller market segments, and while each one is a minow compared to gaming, overall there are very compelling. Robert. > I can also think of many reasons why competition is good, one of which is > faster rate of innovation. > > I think if it weren't Direct3D, if some other standard were competing with > OpenGL, we'd be having this same discussion. Even if that other standard was > also an open standard (which could happen because of the nature of open > standards). So I don't really see the point in discussing it, we can only > accept it and try to make the best of it. > > J-S > -- > ______________________________________________________ > Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] > http://www.cm-labs.com/ > http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ > _______________________________________________ > osg-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org > _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
