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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenjib" data-source="post: 640032" data-attributes="member: 530">Not in consoles yet, but in the PC world, you bet!  Just give them time.  We are already seeing a warning sign.  The current strategy is to lose tons of money by selling what is basically a knock-off product in order to cut profitable and innovative competitors out of the market.  Once that's done they can hike up prices and not worry about pesky innovation coming from anywhere and cutting into their bottom line (gained by selling re-hashes of the same stuff over and over again with no innovation).And why does it favor the PC market?  Because Microsoft used it's monopoly over the desktop to strongarm OpenGL out of the market, replacing it with the proprietary DirectX.  That's why.  It's a pattern that is repeated over and over again in the industry (java vs. C#, media player vs. realplayer, netscape vs. IE, etc.).  Far from being just a tool that M$ uses, it is actually their defacto operating strategy across the board.Consumers would greatly benefit from an open standard, cross-platform 3d rendering programming interface.  That would let us play all the games we like on whatever platform we prefer.  Locking games to specific platforms is good for marketing but bad for consumers.  Someone mentioned above that Blizzard is working on something that would provide such a cross-platform interface.  If they get bought by M$, I can guarantee you that that will be the first project that gets the axe.  I wouldn't even be surprised if that was one of the reasons explicitly why M$ is targetting Vivendi in particular, rather than another one of the big game software houses.An open gaming platform API is one of the best things that could possibly happen to the computer industry and the effects would reverberate through the sector in many unforeseen ways.</blockquote>

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