By Prince McLean

Published: 10:10 AM EST

Expansion of the QuickTime Parachute

As part of its cross platform strategy for QuickTime, Apple continued porting parts of the Mac Toolbox used by QuickTime to run on other hardware architectures, including Silicon Graphic's MIPS-based IRIX graphics workstations. The result of this portability effort came to be referred to as the QuickTime Media Layer, a portfolio of technology Apple could depend upon if it had to jump off the Mac platform.

Among the additions to QuickTime Apple made in the mid 90s was QuickTime VR, for creating immersive, interactive object and panoramic videos. While Apple struggled to maintain its QuickTime portfolio as its refuge against the increasing tidal wave of commodity PCs running Windows, Microsoft announced additional plans of its own for washing over Apple's remaining territory. In mid 1996, it floated Active Movie as a cross platform solution identical to QuickTime in features and announced Surround Video as a competitor to QuickTime VR.

Fortunately for Apple, Surround Video never went anywhere and Active Movie was never delivered cross platform. Instead, it was relegated to being another Windows movie playback system to replace VfW, and was later folded into the Direct X package under the name Direct Show. Apple had problems of its own, however. The fiasco of Copland and related development failures had contributed toward an exodus of engineering talent. Bruce Leak, who pioneered QuickTime development at Apple, left in 1995 to help start WebTV, which was made up largely of employees from Apple and its General Magic spin off.

As Apple bottomed out in 1996, it began talks with NeXT. Among other features of the NeXTSTEP operating system, Jobs demonstrated NEXTIME (below), its own media development tool. Like everything else at NeXT, it benefitted from sitting upon a modern Unix foundation and being tightly integrated into the advanced AppKit development frameworks. This was particularly compelling for Apple because it has been centering its future strategies around QuickTime; migrating the two companies together seemed like the perfect fit because NeXT supplied strong replacements for all the pieces that were weak on the Mac, and Apple could provide a market for NeXT's largely overlooked software technology.



QuickTime Reborn

As Apple filled out its strategy for merging NeXTSTEP with its own portfolio of assets, including QuickTime, it restarted media development efforts that had fallen off into limbo. Among them were QuickTime 3.0, which had acquired the baggage of QuickTime Interactive, an extensive hypermedia development system based upon HyperCard.

Jobs canceled a wide variety of projects at Apple that fell out of the scope of its newly refined mission to get back on track and begin innovating again. Among them were QTi. Instead, efforts were devoted to pare down QuickTime 3.0 (below, as included in the Rhapsody DR2 release) into a practical, shippable product that would throw Apple back into relevancy in the media development race.



While earlier versions of QuickTime had tried to nurture a market for multimedia creations deployed on CD-ROM--something QTi and HyperCard were oriented toward--by 1997 it was obvious that the real market for media development was the Internet. Macromedia's newly acquired Flash and RealNetworks' RealAudio and RealVideo streaming products were being aimed at that online market. Having been late to identify the importance of the web, Microsoft was also now gunning toward dominating Internet media, too.

Microsoft Goes On the Offensive

In early 1997, Microsoft acquired WebTV and began retooling the company and its products to fit its Windows-centric strategy, as noted in the article Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV. Microsoft also notified Apple that it would have to cancel the development of QuickTime playback on Windows. Microsoft's Christopher Phillips famously told QuickTime manager Peter Hoddie, "we want you to knife the baby."

After Apple repeatedly refused to drop QuickTime for Windows, Microsoft made it clear that if Apple did not hand over media playback to Microsoft, the company would throw its weight into developing its own authoring tools and simply obliterate Apple. Deposition testimony in the Microsoft Monopoly Trial reported that Eric Engstrom, Microsoft's manager of multimedia technology, threatened that “if necessary, Microsoft would assign 150 engineers to an authoring development project in order to displace Apple from that market.”

At that time, Apple's entire QuickTime group only had around 100 engineers. Engstrom reported that Bill Gates was not interested in an authoring program because the market for was too small. However, he assured Apple that “if Microsoft needed to make an investment in providing authoring tools in order to push Apple out of the playback market, then the company would devote all the necessary resources to accomplish that goal.”

“We're going to compete fiercely on multimedia playback, and we won't let anybody [else] have playback in Windows. We consider that part of the operating system, so you're going to have to give up multimedia playback on Windows,” Engstrom repeated in a phone conversation, as noted in Microsoft's Plot to Kill QuickTime.

Microsoft subsequently jumped on Avid Cinema, a new consumer video editing product based on QuickTime that long time Apple partner Avid was preparing to release. The company told Avid engineers, "You need to rip QuickTime out of your product if you want to be in this channel." It had deepened its involvement with Avid in a 1998 deal that resulted in Microsoft owning 9.1% stake in the company. A few months later, Avid announced its partnership with Microsoft in the company's new Advanced Authoring Format for multimedia authoring. That signaled a direct assault on Apple's QuickTime, as promised.

Microsoft intended AAF (authoring) and ASF (streaming) to become the center of its new Windows Media architecture, and simply obliterate QuickTime by buying up the most visible user of QuickTime next to Adobe's Premier video editing product. That strategy ended up backfiring.

The Tables Turn for QuickTime

In early 1998, the ISO's Motion Pictures Expert Group announced its choice to base the container format for the upcoming MPEG-4 standard upon Apple's QuickTime rather than Microsoft's ASF, citing the maturity of Apple's technology over Microsoft's brand new and unproven architecture.

Further, while Adobe was making Avid-like moves to distance itself from QuickTime in Premier, Randy Ubillos and the development team behind Premier had left the company for Macromedia in 1995, hoping to deliver a new professional level video editor based on QuickTime that went beyond what Adobe had in mind for Premiere. However, by 1998 Macromedia had focused its attention on Flash, and was ready to get rid of Ubillos' Key Grip project, which had been renamed Final Cut.

Microsoft's efforts to strip QuickTime support from Avid had put Apple on the defensive; it agreed to buy Final Cut from Macromedia, initially just to keep the project alive. It subsequently realized the best way to make sure that significant QuickTime applications remained intact was to maintain them itself, as noted in How Microsoft Pushed QuickTime's Final Cut.



That year, Apple also released QuickTime 3.0, which delivered full authoring support for Windows as a direct challenge to Microsoft's AAF and Windows Media initiatives.

On page 3 of 4: A New Trajectory for QuickTime; New Applications for QuickTime; New QuickTime Hardware; and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger & QuickTime 7.