So much for Chromeffects soaking up cpu speed anytime soon.
=====================================================
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
management. 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 multimedia 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 Real's
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 in
order 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." |
