It's All in the Delivery: A Look at the Top Video Players of Today and Tomorrow

I used to be an old Borland supporter and one of the first certified NetWare Engineers. In fact, I still think Quattro Pro is a better spreadsheet than Excel. But after seeing Microsoft decimate its competitors, I crossed over and became an avid supporter and evangelist. In fact, when I started my company, I made a conscious decision to exclusively support Microsoft’s Windows Media technology. But many of these wins came before Microsoft had to defend its competitive practices against a deluge of industry complaints. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) ultimately fined Microsoft for monopolistic practices and imposed restrictions that limited how Microsoft could promote its other Windows-based applications and technologies.

In its post-DOJ era, Microsoft isn’t the juggernaut it once was, some might say. Here are a few notable Microsoft failures:

—Microsoft PressPlay (et al.) versus Apple’s iTunes—winner: Apple
—Microsoft Search versus Google—winner: Google
—Microsoft XPS versus Adobe PDF—winner: Adobe
—Microsoft Windows Media versus Macromedia Flash (now owned by Adobe)—winner: Macromedia

Microsoft appears to be struggling on other fronts as well. Its Vista operating system had difficulty getting out the door and is struggling to measure up to analysts’ expectations. The company is also getting serious competition on the server front from Linux and renewed competition on the browser front from Firefox and others.

Google appears to be Microsoft’s biggest threat in the world of internet "widgets," as Richard Titus—who helped start Razorfish and another digital media company called Schematics—likes to refer to these small applications that will soon drive everything from word processing and spreadsheets to media applications.

Google owns the largest streaming site on the internet, YouTube, which uses Adobe’s Flash technology to power its videos. Unless you’ve been asleep in a cave, you have probably used it many times during this presidential election season to view Saturday Night Live skits or other memorable pop culture content. Both Adobe and Google have beaten Microsoft in the past, as previously noted, and they are not intimidated by the Redmond behemoth.

In the RIA space, Adobe is Microsoft’s biggest threat. In the post-DOJ era, you can’t easily predict that Microsoft will eventually win the epic video playback technology battle that lies ahead. Just as easily as Microsoft took down the likes of Wang, Lotus, Word Perfect, Borland, Novell, and a host of others, so too is Microsoft vulnerable to becoming a footnote in the digital media era.

With that as an introduction, here is a summary of the leading video playback technology providers who seem to have relevant technology in the space today.

Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media Technologies
Microsoft’s streaming and creative technologies have lagged behind Adobe’s, and, as a result, Microsoft has lost significant market share to Adobe in the streaming media market. With the announcement of Silverlight 2.0, which will be supported by AOL and Nokia, Microsoft is looking for significant penetration of desktop deployments of the new streaming technology in the next few months.

Microsoft is also leveraging its leadership in the development community with .NET and Visual Studios to help it gain new ground in the digital media space. Microsoft probably did one of the smartest things ever when it integrated Silverlight Expression, the company’s creative design application, with Visual Studios, its software development tool. Developers I spoke with love this integration, which is allowing many of them to develop rich internet applications (RIAs) they normally would not have been able to, at least not as easily and cost effectively.