Microsoft Joins The Khronos WebGL Working Group

[MartinN]

pfft

Come back to me when the headline reads "M$ drop DirectWhatever in favor of OpenGL 5.0" or something close to it..... that, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.

[Luke_Wolf]

Wow, just because it's Microsoft you guys are immediately going off into conspiracy theory bullshit land. How about we stop and realize that WebGL has become the standard for 3D rendering in the web browser, and that maybe just maybe... Microsoft wants a say in how a standard they're having to implement evolves. Besides if Microsoft really wanted to disrupt WebGL all they would have had to have done is not implement it, and instead just offer D3DForWebClient.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, plus today's Microsoft is no longer headed by Ballmer. I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt here.

[Ancurio]

If MS is going to offer WebGL on Windows Phone 8, they might as well go ahead and properly offer GLES 2 on it. Their platform is pretty much dead without it anyway; who the hell rewrites their mobile games to a different graphics framework to run on 2% of marketshare.

[grndzro]

Yea, plus today's Microsoft is no longer headed by Ballmer. I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt here.

+1

...I guess I need at least 5 characters

[sdack]

Wow, just because it's Microsoft you guys are immediately going off into conspiracy theory bullshit land. How about we stop and realize that WebGL has become the standard for 3D rendering in the web browser, and that maybe just maybe... Microsoft wants a say in how a standard they're having to implement evolves. Besides if Microsoft really wanted to disrupt WebGL all they would have had to have done is not implement it, and instead just offer D3DForWebClient.

It is nice of you to show us your defiance of bull shit, but you are wrong. It is not at all "conspiracy theory bullshit". It is actually "good capitalism". You do give reason why M$ will have to fear it, and they will fear it, because this is what they do in their meetings on how to stay No.1. They cannot leave it to chance. They have deep pockets and they want to keep having these deep pockets. They are also not know for being a great innovator like Apple for instance is, but they are good at adopting and at dominating the market with their products. They will definitely try to support it only to satisfy their customers and to keep them happy. They need to do this or where else would their customers get it from?!
M$ likes to make their customers happy and binds them to them. And it is not a bad thing. What is bad are the prices for their product licenses. Web-based 3D has got a bright future, like anything else that has got to do with 3D. They have to be a part of it.

So you can be sure of it that they will take part in it, adopt it, make it their own, extend it, and use it to keep their customers depending on them so they can keep selling their licenses. The best way to do this is by adding support for it into every of their products, to make their customers want it (or having to use it, whichever) and in a way it becomes impossible for competitors to copy it.

The moment Microsoft allows a major standard to develop on its own and without their influence and "supervision" is the day they start to collapse in on themselves.

This has little to do with conspiracy. It has much more to do with watching a giant running down a hill, never loosing any momentum, because the giant cannot do anything but run.

[Paul-L]

Wow, just because it's Microsoft you guys are immediately going off into conspiracy theory bullshit land. How about we stop and realize that WebGL has become the standard for 3D rendering in the web browser, and that maybe just maybe... Microsoft wants a say in how a standard they're having to implement evolves. Besides if Microsoft really wanted to disrupt WebGL all they would have had to have done is not implement it, and instead just offer D3DForWebClient.

Given their market share, if they wanted to disrupt WebGL, they wouldn't have a way to do it. D3DForWebClient would not stand a chance and probably could have made Windows Phone 8(.x) less used than it is now. And there is not enough IE share to make the change worth of the headaches, because the most used Internet Explorer versions are not the lastest's in most statistics.

And most of this is given the history of MS itself, including the history Microsoft had with OpenGL, which turned badly for OpenGL actually.


But maybe this collaboration can be better and give some results actually, because one, Steve Ballmer is not giving the orders anymore, and two, because other products seem to have become better since Satya Nadella is the new head of MS, naming Xbox One and Windows 8.1 Update 1, the only examples so far I think.

[MartinN]

Yea, plus today's Microsoft is no longer headed by Ballmer. I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt here.

Don't hold your breath - though Nutella does seem more promising than Ballmer, for now...

[Luke_Wolf]

They are also not know for being a great innovator like Apple for instance is,

Whelp you just lost all credibility, as you rather clearly know nothing about either company if that's what you think.

Apple themselves is responsible for only a very small set of things, which basically amount to a few languages, some toolkits, and a display server. Everything else they either bought out the people developing something and let them continue working on it but only for their products, they stole, or they make claims about but were not responsible at all for the development of, they just happened to jump in at the right time after someone else developed it for them.

• MP3 players were around before the iPod
• Microsoft and Palm (and later RIM, and Nokia), are responsible for what developed into the smartphone through the development of PDAs which eventually merged with phones. RIM and Nokia took things further and only after all this did Apple jump in with the iPhone
• From the early 2000s up till around 2010 Microsoft, alongside HP and a couple other OEMs was the only company spearheading development of what would become the tablet. The problem was that Microsoft was trying to force their desktop OS onto the tablet form factor up until Windows 8, and the hardware hadn't developed sufficiently during that time and so because of this Jobs was able to swoop in and snatch up marketshare.
• Smartwatches will never be a thing but wanna guess which company was involved in a smartwatch project called the SPOTwatch, and was trying to push the internet of things back in the mid 2000s? Microsoft.
• The GUI was developed by Xerox and reverse engineered by Apple, and they haven't actually innovated on the GUI front since the original reverse engineering (seriously, Microsoft from Windows 95 to Windows 7 changed the gui more than Apple has since it first RE'd theirs). Other projects such as GEOS were also being developed during that timeframe, and not the result of reverse engineering efforts. iOS's GUI is nothing special and the principles were developed during the time of PalmOS. At least NeXT did things differently.
• Darwin is a mashup of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mach with nothing particularly innovative about it. Microsoft on the other hand developed an entirely new OS that operates on it's own novel design called NT, and through the Singularity/Midori project is working on developing a managed microkernel, and a library OS through Drawbridge.
• Although not a direct innovation in and of itself Microsoft spurred on the development of and created interest in the idea of low cost 3D sensors, Apple has done nothing along these lines.
• The Commodore 64 not the Apple computers were the king of personal computing back in the day, and the Commodore Amiga was the king of A/V work. Apple only inherited this marketshare when Commodore died during the proprietary computing wars because Apple chose to stay out of the fight and they were the only remaining company that used the same processor architecture as the Amiga (even if it was an inferior chip), which was far better for A/V work than x86 was. Today said workloads are running on Linux clusters.

I could go on but this list is pretty long already. Apple is a marketing company not an innovating or development one, Microsoft on the other hand no matter how much they want to pretend otherwise is a software house, and no matter how much you in your blind hatred want to pretend otherwise has done a very significant amount of development and innovation on their part. Now whether Microsoft is more innovative than say IBM, or HP can be argued, but it's no contest versus Apple.

[sdack]

...

You are funny troll. Just because Microsoft did a bit of this and a bit of that does it not make them great, nor does it make others bad. I have no idea what you want with my credibility, or what you want to use it for as I think you are just looking for another idol who you can look up to. Perhaps do not start with it in the first place. To then somehow claim Apple was not great at innovating new things just shows how little you want to give anyone any credit in the first place. So cheer up. You suck and you do not have a clue. You are just ranting over nothing and nobody wants to read this. It is going to take a while before you get this.