I attended a short Technology seminar yesterday on upgrades and security issues at the Boston hospital where I work. Apple sent a sales rep and an engineer to talk about OS X for those MDs and hospital personnel still working in OS 9.
Of course, Apple is notorious for keeping its plans mum, but I was dismayed to hear from both the sales rep and the engineer that the company does not as yet have any plans to license the QuickTime architecture—or work on a license for MPEG-4—to manufacturers of DVD players.
If Apple doesn’t get in with DVD players, they’re going to get creamed by Microsoft which is already establishing deals with digital theaters and you just know they’re working with DVD manufacturers themselves to get them to play any disk with Windows Media 9 files.
I think QuickTime remains the best way to reach out to new customers, and Apple sorely needs new customers, not just the existing base of Mac fanatics. If you’re a home movie buff and you know that you can just burn your QuickTimes to a disk and pop them in the DVD player in your living room without having to author a DVD-R or pay someone to do it for you, then that’s a huge advantage in the marketplace for Apple.
I hope they’re working on this.
That said, it was nice to see how many doctors rely on Macs for their work and research. And OS X servers seem to be making inroads amongst IS administrators in the business world.