Goodbye Windows Media, Hello 'Everywhere'?

2:22p.m., Fri 16 Feb 2007

Microsoft have had an odd history of supporting Mac products. It seems to come in cycles. Their Internet Explorer for Mac was a quality piece of kit when it first appeared, the first major browser to offer good CSS2 support and it gathered a clutch of awards. Quite rightly too. But times move on and now we're in an epoch where Microsoft seem to be giving up supporting the Mac-using community.

The latest product to die a death is the Windows Media plug-in - replaced by Flip4Mac a plug-in for Quicktime which allows playback of .wma and .wmv files. Flip4Mac has been around for an age as a paid-for download but is now free and aparently endorsed by Microsoft.

The main thrust of my interest in this subject is the motives behind the decision. Has Microsoft given up on streamed media? Of course not. But the Media Player has been edged from the market. iTunes killed .wma and Flash video streaming killed .wmv.

I suspect Microsoft's motives for endorsing the Flip4Mac plug-in are a temporary stop-gap before they start pushing (the unsexily named) Windows Presentation Foundation 'Everywhere'.

WPF/E is Microsoft's answer to Flash. It has it's own authoring environment ("Expression") and the marketing blurb calls it a "solution for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond". Sounds familiar, no? It supports legacy windows media formats and the project is presented as a staunchly cross-platform, cross-browser effort. It's pre-installed on Windows Vista and it, perhaps tellingly, has a way more sophisticated DRM than iTunes and Flash can currently muster (allegedly).

I've noticed that a whole slew of articles about Windows Media Player disappeared in a recent tidy-up for msdn.com. It feels like Microsoft are scaling back any investment & support in its archaic and usurped application to ready to push a new app - isn't that just the Microsoft way ;)

I xpect Microsoft to get the Vista launch and publicity out of the way before shouting about anything else. I also xpect marketeers to be let loose on WPF/E to come up with a sexy name. It's currently available as a preview download so it's still in development. By the time it finally gets a release we may have seen another version of Flash and another iteration of iTunes and Microsoft may be even further behind.

One thing that seems unlikely though, is that Microsoft won't move to fill the Windows Media-shaped hole. The digital media market is about to explode and Microsoft aren't going to sit by and watch.