Quote Originally Posted by Woochifer
Check again. In the audio industry and in the video download arena that you keep touting as the wave of the future, Apple IS the man. iPod sales alone are roughly TRIPLE what the ENTIRE home audio component industry sells. And they are the number one vendor of both music and video downloads, hardly what I would call a joke.

And on their computers, who's calling their stuff a joke when pundit after pundit has begun recommending Macs in light of Microsoft's continuing disaster with Vista? I don't use a Mac because it's "cute." I use one because it does what I need a computer to do with the fewer headaches, crashes, and security issues. Try one out sometime, you might actually learn something. Then again, your posting pattern would seem to indicate otherwise!



And to think I was silly enough to believe that connect-the-dots was a mere child's play game -- I guess to you, it's quite an advanced concept because you don't get it.

Microsoft is a monopolist that, for every market that they enter, tries to steer that market towards their proprietary formats and standards. In the case of HD-DVD, that would be VC-1 and HDi. To them, Blu-ray is the enemy because its underlying technology uses open standards such as MPEG-4 H.264 and Java. Toshiba was a pawn because they were on the verge of agreeing to a one-format compromise with Blu-ray similar to when Sony and Philips dropped their competing video disc format and allowed a unified DVD format to move forward back in 1995. Microsoft made it sound like they would be an involved HD-DVD partner, and use their market muscle to promote the format. But, their support only went far enough to prod Toshiba into launching HD-DVD. They wanted to muddy the market for Sony and Blu-ray, but they weren't willing to put up much of a fight once things started going south for HD-DVD.

And Microsoft's history of screwing their partners is long and well documented. Microsoft saw an opportunity to divide the market, so they quickly announced that they would support HD-DVD, which Toshiba mistakenly saw as a market opportunity for HD-DVD. But, Microsoft's support was half-a$$ed and two-faced. They never put their money where their mouth was. They could've delayed the Xbox360 launch in order to integrate the HD-DVD drive into the console design, but they didn't.

Microsoft will only go all out for their own interests, not when the initiative involves a partner. Just look at their whole PlaysForSure disaster. They got a bunch of hardware partners like Creative to sign on, and less than two years later when PlaysForSure fails to gain market traction against the iPod, Microsoft goes on their own with the Zune and screws their PlaysForSure partners. Toshiba's only the latest Microsoft partner in a long line.

OH PLEASE!
I am not a "lover" of microsoft but the truth is we need standards in the computer world.
You take it for granted but the only reason everybody on this site can talk to each other is
protocols and standards. AND SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ENFORCE THOSE STANDARDS.
As for Apple being a joke I was reffering to their line of toy computers, most of which you can't put an extra HD or anything else in.
And true vista has had problems but thats why you dont buy an operating system until its been around for awhile.
XP has been trouble free for me, I see no reason to upgrade, and wont until the compatibility problems have been addressed.
But thse are nothing compared to APPLES SIMILAR PROBLEMS.
Artsy types like people in publishing and some media like Apple, but most in serious lines of work use PC, as do most people.
As for micro being a "monopolist" they are guilty of no more or less than other companies.
People always look out for their self inyerest.
And to blame the demise of HALF BAKED format that was doomed to failure from the start on their "half assed efforts", if they had done more would you be screaming they were "monopolistic"?
Thats what I thought.
As for trying to "steer" the industry towards a few industry codecs , whats wrong with that?
Why do we need ten different ways of doing something?
The superiority of VC-1 is well known BTW.
Microsoft saw two competing formats and went with the wrong one, simple as that.
They probably thought cost would be a factor like its been in every format war so far,
and they guessed wrong..
Look at it this way, do you really think the boys who came up with Vista ARE REALLY CAPABLE OF SUCH far reaching "conspiracies"?

People who see such conspiracies are guilty of a logical fallacy.
They see ten wrecks at an intersection and think someone must be causing those wrecks.
When its probably a poorly designed intersection.
Sure micro backed a disc format, big deal, there were two, the chances were fifty fifty they were going to back either one, they just backed the wrong one.
God help us if they HAD backed Blu Ray, all of you conspiracy wackjobs would be having a fit right about now, screaming about how micro is "taking over"!