Katie Marsal and Kasper JadeFollowing a stream of unconfirmed reports on the Internet, Microsoft on Thursday said it has officially halted development of its Windows Media Player for the Mac and plans no future Mac versions of the audio and video playback software.
Anderson told the publication the decision to halt work on Windows Media Player for the Mac was a matter of prioritizing for Microsoft's Windows Media Unit.
"It's basically a business decision for Microsoft," he said. "Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers."
Microsoft will continue to offer for download the current Mac OS X version, Windows Media Player 9, which was last updated in November 2003, as well as an even older version for Mac OS 9.
In place of a new version, the software-maker is offering for free a ">Flip4Mac plug-in that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) from within Apple's QuickTime Player software.
The move comes just as Microsoft renewed its commitment to the Mac, agreeing to deliver new versions of Office for Mac for the next five years.
Last month Microsoft also announced that it had officially canned development of a new version of Internet Explorer for the Mac. There's no word on the company's plans for its other core Mac product, Virtual PC.
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81 Comments
There isn't any problem for us users when WM is being played inside QT player, is there?
This kinda make sense to me really, it's actually a nice move from Microsoft.
I mean if they offer a plugin to play .wma and .wmv files in Quicktime, that means one less app to install and to run, and I'm pretty sure most Mac users only installed WMP to be able to play wma and wmv files anyway.
Good riddance. Windows Media Player is the worst piece of shit-ware I have ever had the displeasure of stumbling across. Hell, it's worse than Real One player. And that's saying something.
I totally understand MS's move. They need programmers to "finish" Vista...
I bought Flip4Mac a while ago, and it really works great. There were only ever a few files I ran into that didn't work so well. Everything else, it played as well as if not better than WMP. PLus, you could actually control them. I never was able to use the forward/reverse buttons in media player or jump ahead with the timeline thing.
Flip4mac is great.