This is Google’s idea of open standards, people. Use any video codec you like, as long as its ours. Bend to our whims, or else we’ll take our ball and go home.
The more I read about and think about this bat shit crazy strategy of Google’s, the more I’m convinced that it can ONLY be a direct move against Apple. They want to kill h.264 because Apple has invested so heavily in it. Bring down the media empire. Sounds like a great plan. Until you realize that there’s no way in a million years that its’ actually going to happen.
Google is behaving here like a bully in a position of power. But it isn’t in any position to be making such moves. The only weapon in its arsenal is YouTube. But if YouTube stops working on every iPhone in the world tomorrow, there’s a much better chance that people will jump to some other free video site than replace their iPhones. There are plenty of companies that would love that opportunity to take that from Google. Heck, Apple could start a free video sharing web site and integrate it into iOS in a weekend.
If Chrome had 90% market share the way IE did back in the 90s, they could maybe pull something like this off. But now? It’s a pipe dream.
I’m starting to think that Eric Schmidt and company are losing it.
And for those few of you who still haven’t figured out that the whole “open” and “royalty free” debate holds no merit: What’s to prevent Google, who owns all the patents on WebM but has promised never to charge for WebM’s use, from waiting until WebM becomes the de facto standard, and THEN beginning to charge fees? A patent owned by one vendor (Google) is far more dangerous than one held by a consortium of companies (MPEG LA).
We weren’t at an impasse in the evolution in HTML video until Google made it so this week. H.264 was well on its way to becoming the official spec; Firefox had peaked in its growth and was months from needing to capitulate. Google is stirring the pot here just for spite. And their arguments to the contrary are simply not credible.
