Re: [tlug] WMP on Linux

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Monday 05 May 2003 15:04, Godwin Stewart wrote:

> In short, I think having WMP ported to Linux is nothing but PR. Nobody will
> actually use it.

I have this weird feeling that someone secretly replaced the TLUG list
with /. and nobody actually read the article before commenting on it.

The company doing the port has a strong background in developing
apps for embedded Linux.

I think we would all agree that the use of Linux on portable media
players is going to be a big thing.

Microsoft, whatever we may think of a lot of its software, has almost
always displayed strong business sense and has always recovered from
those times when it has not.  Therefore, MS would doubtless very much like
to see its software running on those media players, regardless of what OS
is underneath.

Now to answer the question, "Will anybody use it?"  Yeah, I think a lot of
people will.  Most of the people who buy a portable media player 
don't know, and certainly don't care, what the OS is, or who wrote the
application software.  They care that it plays their music files.

And what does MS care most about?  Making money.  If in 3 years
the market is selling, say, 10 million Linux-based media players a year
and they all have software licensed from MS, then MS stands to make
a bunchof money from that, without harming any of their existing product
lines (another natural biggie for MS),  b/c AFAIK no existing portable
media player runs WinCE (something which would certainly be overkill for a
single-purpose device).

Read the article, it's pretty interesting.

Granted, I don't care much about Windows Media (or Ogg or MP3, either),
but a lot of other people do.

Jonathan
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Jonathan Q
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