On 2001-09-08 19:25, Anonymous wrote:

Sure, Apple bought SoundJam and used it as the basis of the free iTunes. At least they bought it. And C&G didn’t have to sell it. They probably has good reasons for selling.

Actually, Apple hired the creator of SoundJam. As far as I know, they never bought anything from C&G.
-Dan

On 2001-09-07 11:09, DaiMac wrote:
I do think MS is a monopoly, but really computer users (besides linux heads, mac faithful, and the other smaller groups) brought all this on themselves. IBM had a viable x86 competitor in OS/2, people just didn’t buy it.

That’s because Microsoft made sure to poison OS/2 before it was first released.  If you go check the historical archives, OS/2 was supposed to be a joint “enterprise-level” OS venture between Microsoft and IBM.  Bill Gates even publically told developers, “Don’t write your word processors/spreadsheets/applications for our upcoming Windows 3.1; write it for OS/2, because that’s where the future is at.”

Everyone believed him.

Unfortunately, it was a complete lie.  Microsoft only devoted a handful of folks to work on OS/2—everyone else was working on Windows 3.1, along with MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, etc. for it.  A few noncompetitive developers were told the truth—game programmers, for instance, were told that OS/2 would be dead and that they should program for Windows—but most people were lied to by Microsoft, and thought OS/2 was the big future.

So what happens?  Microsoft keeps stalling on OS/2, and it misses its much-touted release date.  At about the same time, Microsoft releases Windows 3.1—and whaddayaknow?  There’s Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and all sorts of other productivity programs for it.  By the time third-party alternatives come ou eight months later, Microsoft has already secured a big chunk of the Windows applications market.

Upshot: IBM gets screwed on OS/2, and WordPerfect, Lotus, etc. get screwed on the applications front.  And Microsoft’s monopoly gets entrenched even more…

On 2001-09-08 19:25, Anonymous wrote:

On 2001-09-07 11:09, DaiMac wrote:

It’s not to say that Apple has NEVER incorporated a feature into the OS that might compete directly with other software packages. iTunes is a perfect example.

 

iTunes is a bad example. You can use ANY other MP3 player and/or burning software you want. You can remove iTunes and MacOS will still work. This is a far cry from M$ which claimed Win98 would not work if IE was removed (of course this wasn’t completely true, see Win98 Lite).

Sure, Apple bought SoundJam and used it as the basis of the free iTunes. At least they bought it. And C&G didn’t have to sell it. They probably has good reasons for selling.

All I was saying is that even when Apple did give something away for free (iTunes isn’t even technically bundled with the OS yet, is it?) that could be seen as anticompetitive, they did it in a much more open and less repressive manner than MS could have.

Just for the record, not only did Apple not buy anything from Casady & Greene for iTunes/SoundJam, they hired the developer out from under C&G leaving C&G without ongoing development of SoundJam.  I thought this was a tad lame.

That said, perhaps Apple offered money for SoundJam and C&G refused.  I have no idea what happened behind the scenes other than what I said above.

Still, Apple did not artificially tie iTunes into the Mac OS, thereby making it difficult for users to use another program.

On 2001-09-09 12:34, otaojones wrote:
they have already gotten “away” with it the horse is out of the barn and moneysoft knows it nt is the next speghetti ware that we will have to deal with if they are allowed to release that on tiiiiiime free computing on your own hard drive or even the ability to add new hardware is kaput (allusion intended)

taojones

That’d be why the D of J want an expedited period of discovery, Jones.  They’re catching up on all that lost tiiiiime, while they were diddling about in court and development zipped forward.  Fear not, there’ll be all manner of goodies to investigate now.

Meanwhile, the EU’s antitrust investigation is getting right in there with Windows 2000.  Good on ‘em, too.

_________________
Void where prohibited.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Raena on 2001-09-11 06:05 ]</font>