Marco.org

By Wil Shipley. Excellent piece.

The nice thing about FLV support being add in Perian is that Apple essentially has a bunch of suckers (I use the term lovingly) taking all the risk for them. If nobody cares about third-party movie formats — well, Apple didn’t spend any time on it. Shrug! If EVERYBODY cares about them — well, there they are! Go download ‘em! In fact, hey, these are open source — Apple could just start bundling with them. No effort spent on Apple’s part, but their marketshare just got a lot bigger.

This is the beauty of open systems. Apple has a ton of very talented designers and very smart engineers. But they shouldn’t have to be the ONLY smart people in the world, who must anticipate everything every customer might ever need. It’s asking too much.