beeyp, MS developed .NET and C# and gave it away. The Palladium spec is going to be given away. UPnP was given away. I could go on.
Apple's standards support is questionable. It's bad enough when they don't even acknowledge the standards by their actual names and let Mac users believe they invented everything Apple supports. It's even worse when they claim standards support and superiority when their support is not complete and the claimed superiority of the standard is nothing but a lie. I'll give some evidence and examples:
Steve never mentioned that Quicktime does not support all profiles of the MP4 standard. He never mentioned that iCal was based upon the iCal/iCalendar standard, and that their full compliance to that standard in the version 1 product is uncertain. He never mentioned that Rendezvous is mearly Apple's implementation of the ZeroConf standard. Many of the supporting technologies behind ZeroConf were engineered by several companies, including Microsoft. http://www.zeroconf.org
Try playing a standard MP4 file from http://www.envivio.com/products/etv/sample.html and you will find that many will not play in Quicktime. Also, if they support of the MP4 standard, why do they require you to use Quicktime to access much of their content? Even when there is an MP4 file on their server, they hide it by linking to it with a .mov file, or make the interface to the content rely on their player.
For iCal, here's a quote from an Apple employee:
"...we have to admit we put no specific efforts in ensuring perfect
inter-operability in this version, but we definitely aim at being
better citizens in future releases."
-- Bertrand Guiheneuf <bertrandg@apple.com>
http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/mail-archive/msg05901.html
As for openness, you don't have to look far to see that Apple's software is tied to the purchase of hardware that is more expensive and slower than PCs, and can't be upgraded as much. And if you look at computing before Microsoft, you will find that it was largely Microsoft that made the industry open in the first place. Before they came along with their "software is more valuable than the hardware" paradigm, everyone was trying to sell closed platforms -- mostly based on some form of Unix as far as buisnesses were concerned. For home users, there were many proprietary systems against which Apple didn't really do any beter than they are doing against Microsoft. The market was flodded with many platforms, each with their own line of accessories and software that didn't work with most (if any) other companies' systems.
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