IP: Microsoft shelves Chromeffects

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

X-Sender: craig () lw net
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 09:18:49 -0500
To: OpenDTV Mail List <OpenDTV () pcube com>
From: Craig Birkmaier <craig () pcube com>


Yesterday I inadvertantly sent a message to Bill Miller that was not
intended for the list. I deleted all of the address on the TO line but
missed the CC line. My apologies.

In that message I stated: "Tom Mcmahon gave me a heads up about significant
changes taking place at Microsoft today."

The basis for that statement was a news story that Tom sent to me about
Microsoft's
decision to withdraw Chromeffects from the market that included some
information
about re-alignments in management in the multimedia area. Here is the
story. It is loaded
with links, so you might prefer going to the C/net web site to view the story.

Regards
Craig

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,28731,00.html?pt.ms..feed.ne_home


Microsoft shelves Chromeffects
By Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 12, 1998, 6:30 p.m. PT

Microsoft's multimedia efforts faltered this week as the company
back-burnered its Chromeffects 3D graphics technology and shuffled
its multimedia management team, CNET News.com has learned.

Announced in July, the Chromeffects software developer kit was
released the following month. A general release of the Windows
add-on was scheduled for next quarter--but Microsoft this week decided
to move back that date indefinitely.

"Based on developer feedback, we are stepping back and redesigning
Chromeffects technologies to better meet both our partner and customer
needs," said Rob Bennett, marketing group product manager for personal
and business systems at Microsoft.

Concurrently, Microsoft has moved Eric Engstrom, its general manager for
multimedia efforts, over to the MSN team, where he will be general manager
of Web product development. His former responsibilities in multimedia--
the troubled Chromeffects efforts as well as Microsoft's NetShow streaming
media technologies--will fall to Deborah Black, who will maintain her current
title of general manager of Windows presentation technologies.

Chromeffects, built to arm everyday Web sites with the kind of powerful
multimedia and animation found in gaming environments, has encountered a
barrage of criticism from the developer community since its launch three
months ago. Dominating the developer wish list are requests for better
compliance with World Wide Web Consortium recommendations, both those
already ratified and those currently under consideration.

One W3C recommendation is the recently approved document object model,
which lets programs and scripting languages act on various Web page elements.

Another Web standard where Chromeffects needs work is HTML+TIME. Acknowledged
by the W3C in September, this key submission would let multimedia
presentations
on the Web interact with HTML elements.

Microsoft will work on better visualization techniques, and better support
for database integration including data binding on the front end and XML
Query Language on the back end.

Data binding, introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser version 4.0,
lets the browser access a database and render its information on a Web page.
XQL, recently taken under consideration by the  W3C, is a method for making
information contained in Web pages more easily and thoroughly searchable.

In addition to standards support, developers found fault with Chromeffects'
performance and quality with device drivers.

Microsoft will send Chromeffects back to the shop for an undetermined period
of time. Originially called Chrome and designed as an add-on to the Windows
operating system, Chromeffects is unlikely to be released with Windows 2000
Professional, which is due next year.

Bennett said that Chromeffects technologies still might ship as an integrated
feature of some future versions of Windows. But that decision has yet to be
made definitively.

Microsoft has long touted Chromeffects as a key part of its multimedia and
Web strategies. The add-on attempts to bridge the company's popular DirectX
gaming technology and the Web, making high-speed multimedia content
accessible using HTML formats so it can be rendered efficiently in a browser.

Chromeffects relies on XML to define various multimedia shapes and objects
so that multimedia content can be assembled at the client even when delivered
to comparatively low-bandwidth environments. In this respect it can be thought
of as a 3D version of Vector Markup Language, a W3C specification for a text
format for 2D graphics.

Microsoft repeatedly has played catch-up in the multimedia arena, with some
success. The company challenged Apple's dominance in multimedia software,
and recently has pushed its NetShow streaming technology to make considerable
inroads against RealNetworks' market-leading video and audio technology.
(Microsoft is an investor in Real, but the relationship between the two
companies has soured in recent months.)

Microsoft may have rushed Chromeffects to market to help it compete against
Real's G2 player, released this summer, according to Dataquest multimedia
analyst Sujata Ramnarayan.

The Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft, which last week
spotlighted multimedia efforts aimed at Apple's QuickTime, also may have
inspired the company to withdraw Chromeffects, she added.

"You cannot help but wonder how much this has to do with the antitrust case,"
Ramnarayan said. "In some ways this technology is related to Java, and also
it would put Real at a disadavantage."

Java, a platform-independent programming language developed by Sun
Microsystems,
is the source of another legal headache for Microsoft. Sun has sued Microsoft
for allegedly "polluting" the cross-platform aspect of Java, in effect
misusing
its license.

"If you look at Java and Chromeffects carefully, the concepts are somewhat
similar," Ramnarayan said. "The way Microsoft had postioned Chromeffects was
that it would render content on your PC. In that respect it's similar to Java."




_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber