Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/5474
December 2009 52 and JavaFX, with their highly developed au- thoring tools and large developer bases. Com- panies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and so forth will want to advance capabilities be- yond the standard and protect some content. e wonderful feature war going on between the Flash and Silverlight development teams will continue to everyone's benefit, and Sun is not likely to leave the game after jumping in with JavaFX. But, there is truly grand po- tential opening up for open Web technologies, and there are companies anxiously develop- ing their applications in anticipation of the day when the new capabilities promised by HTML 5 and WebGL are freely accessible in all browsers. Information to Ponder So, here's something to think about: Microsoft was an important member of the OpenGL ARB back in the days when it was founded by SGI. At that time, the group worked at an excruciating pace in its determination to fulfill the needs of the scientific community served by SGI, as well as the mainstream hardware being churned out by more than 40 graphics chips companies. Microsoft recognized quite clearly that it had to pick its fights, and moved on and developed DirectX in-house. e OpenGL ARB is still often forced to follow Microsoft's lead: As features are imple- mented in DirectX, the OpenGL ARB has to put a priority on those features so non-Micro- soft products can keep up. Yet, as the group hits its milestones and makes its goals, it becomes a force that Microsoft has to consider. It would be more efficient for the industry to see the two come together so there is no longer the step- drag relationship between the two that we are seeing now. Currently, the situation is this: Mi- crosoft includes features in DirectX. Often the new features are brought to Microsoft by hard- ware vendors, including Intel, ATI, and Nvidia, but Microsoft has the last word on what and how features are added to DirectX, and it reveals them to its hardware partners. e firm then scampers back to the Khronos Group to figure out what it needs to do to enable those features in the Khronos APIs. e situation serves Mi- crosoft very well: It gets to stay a step ahead. However, the Khronos Group has evolved a broad ecosystem of interrelated APIs across multiple markets and now a powerful engine, with the schedule-driven development of the OpenGL core complemented by the exten- sion process, which enables the group to de- velop forward-looking capabilities with the hardware manufacturers beyond the OpenGL core. And OpenCL is an example of the Khro- nos Group's ability to develop a hardware API to empower a new development path for the computer industry—GPU Compute. In this, Khronos has moved out ahead. Now there are reasons why Microsoft might want to under- stand what the ARB is planning, rather than the other way around. Will they come together? Will hell freeze over? Maybe. Global warming manifests itself in very mysterious ways. n Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to CGW, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, California-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia, and editor in chief of JPR's "TechWatch." She can be reached at Kathleen@jonpeddie.com. n n n n Trends & Technologies