Microsoft: JPEG? What’s that?
Posted by Mark Nelson on 25th May 2006 | Permanent Link
You’ve seen me write in this space about how the JPEG patent trolls are (IMHO) doing their best to kill the format. While there are always a few morons who will defend the actions of scum like Forgent, most folks can clearly see that the patent system is not being used properly when it is being played like we are seeing now. Even the Supreme Court seemed to be catching on, after only having to buy a couple of vowels.
Well, there is one white knight who can save us when it comes to a standards war, and that white knight is Bill Gates. By putting his mighty research dollars to work, Microsoft has a new photgraphic image format that will be deployed with Windows Vista, and is designed as a drop-in replacement for JPEG. You can bet that the IP on this one is solidly slanted towards Microsoft patents.
No word in the article on royalties, but let me go out on a limb. Manufacturers will pay Microsoft a very palatable royalty to use this in their hardware, O/S and commercial app developers will also pay an easy to swallow royalty, and both will get total indemnification. As a result, the format will be a smashing success.
Prediction part 2: Microsoft will create a freeware license that lets you use this file format in free software, and they won’t bother you for money, but they won’t indemnify you against patent trolls either. But patent trolls who depend on hassling freeware developers are not going to stay in business long.
June 7th, 2006 at 6:59 am
[...] Due to ongoing patent abuse from Forgent and other companies, I’ve been on record recently predicting the demise of the JPEG format. Big companies like stability, and they don’t like having to worry about litigation that can come out of nowhere and ding their bottom line. That’s one reason I think Microsoft’s new image format has a better future than most people think. [...]
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:03 am
A report by MSU concludes that “some one-year old implementations of JPEG 2000 significantly outperform WMPhoto in objective and subjective comparison”. But this is NOT the final word. Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, gives an interesting review of this comparison.