Watching the Apple Emagic acquisition, followed by news that Logic would transition to AudioUnits, followed by a mass influx of new AudioUnits developers into the coreaudio-api list, was very enlightening. The economics of commercial plug-in development is such that once Apple owned Logic and made its intentions clear, developers could not help but be interested in supporting the plug-in architecture. There's a natural follow-on move here -- Microsoft buying one or more of the PC flagship applications, and moving them all to support one new or existing standard, that Microsoft licenses freely to all comers (with an anti-GPL poison pill). Then we're back to familiar territory, Microsoft owning one way to do it, Apple owning a second way to do it, and everyone else supporting one or both. The natural reason to expect this not to happen is the small absolute size of the audio content market to a company like Microsoft. However, strategic issues may come into play in Redmond to make this happen -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro -------------------------------------------------------------------------