I remember in the late 90's the frustration of being unable to play back video content for which there was no codec on the Mac. When I would ask an engineer fro

I remember in the late 90's the frustration of being unable to play back video content for which there was no codec on the Mac. When I would ask an engineer from the Quicktime team about it I was told repeatedly that "we don't do codecs". I don't doubt there was a rationale behind that policy but I was worried that Apple and Quicktime would lose out to Windows if Mac users kept coming across .avi files and were unable to play them. As Apple was circling the drain back in the mid-to-late 90's it appeared to some of us at Apple that the Quicktime team were acting as though, as we would say now, they were too big to fail. It was as though they believed they would survive all of this somehow — being a valuable asset that would not be allowed to die even if the company itself did. And maybe they were right. In hind sight, when Steve came back to Apple, the diminishment of Quicktime had already began. There were a lot of things that Steve seemed to tolerate at first because they were key components of the Apple ecosystem, but like a lot of things that had come to fruit while Steve was not at the helm, he would seek to replace those with NeXT technologies if he could. Ultimately Quicktime "won" though with the adoption of the MPEG-4 standard. But the engineering weight they carried at Apple definitely seemed to have peaked by the close of the 90's.