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He forgot about Microsoft's first attempt at making a Flash/vector competitor, Liquid Motion[1]. It was out around the same time Flash 3/4 started taking off.
by drawkbox 11y ago
He forgot about Microsoft's first attempt at making a Flash/vector competitor, Liquid Motion[1]. It was out around the same time Flash 3/4 started taking off. They later tried again with Silverlight which was a nice effort but horrible timing with mobile about to kill plugins just a couple years later.
Liquid Motion seemed like it could do some damage as DHTML was huge from IE 3/4 and it had the developers on their side because Netscape was wallowing and sucked (document.layers), but they just dropped it. They also did that with tablets and phones so Microsoft usually needs a successful example they can innovate on it seems, otherwise they fumble a bit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Liquid_Motion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Liquid_Motion
- specialist 11y agoI had the bad judgement to build my VR app on top of Liquid Motion. Then Microsoft bought Dimension-X (acquihire) and tubed the product, leaving me an orphan. Liquid Motion greatly boosted the mindshare for Java. An OpenGL code base written in Java validated both technologies. So of course it had to die. For Sun's part, they went the full quixotic with Java 3D, for years refusing to acknowledge anyone would want to use just OpenGL as is. But for its time, Java 3D was the J2EE of scene graph libraries [ducks]. Source: I helped former Liquid Motion employee "Alligator Descartes" design and implement the first public Java OpenGL bindings called "Magician", which was copied by JOGL and others.