

Beginning of the end for Microsoft and other proprietary efforts? - thomas
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/opinion-death-knell-heard-for-microsoft-and-really-all-proprietary-efforts-20090626/

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jcl
It's a little hard to call it the end for Microsoft _and other proprietary
efforts_ , when the lion's share of Microsoft's marketshare loss has been
picked up by Apple.

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ZeroGravitas
I think a great deal of Apple's growth has been due to them being so cornered
that they had to turn to open standards.

One of the big draws of the iPod originally was that it played mp3s. That
seems ridiculous in hindsight but Sony was pushing Atrac and Microsoft was
pushing WMA. (If you ripped your CD on Windows for a while, not only would it
do it in WMA format but it would add DRM which meant your music stopped
working when you re-installed).

I'm not saying Apple doesn't still try to pull proprietary moves when it
thinks it can get away with it, but I do think "Apple=Proprietary" is some
kind of zombie meme from the last century and overstates the case.

As an example Apple got called out for "proprietary" headphones on the first
iPhone just because they recessed it for greater structural integrity, yet
even now it is a "feature" on most phones if they have a standard headphone
jack.

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GeneralMaximus
The fun part is, if Linux grows then all the other open source platforms
(Solaris, the BSDs etc.) also grow (open standards, open source drivers, etc).

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pierrefar
Not necessarily. The Open Source world is riddled with incompatible licenses,
so it's probably not as straightforward as one would hope.

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diN0bot
i hope so. i'm looking forwards to a livelier collaborative eco-system of
open-source or at least open-api modules made by smaller teams rather than
h4444ge corporate efforts. i'm not even sure that the economy of scale is
true, but even if it does it only seems to benefit the tip of the iceberg.

