While Apple has made QuickTime into a multimedia name, its bigger agenda as a software and hardware company pose problems in making it a better and more competitive product over its rivals, according to the former senior QuickTime architect Peter Hoddie.
In an interview with Upside magazine, Hoddie talked about his past, present and future and focused primarily on the direction of his current project as CEO of Generic Media, an Internet media company that is developing solutions to better distribute online multimedia content.
In the Q&A interview, Hoddie talked about the problem that QuickTime faces at Apple, as well as Windows media at Microsoft, in terms of having to deal with larger corporate agendas.
While Hoddie acknowledged that QuickTime has become “extremely successful” and is “certainly competitive with anything else that’s out there and, in many ways, superior,” he cautioned that because Apple is more than just a multimedia client producer, additional challenges and problems arise to making QT more competitive.
“But one of the advantages that somebody like Real (Networks) has is that they are a company that’s doing exactly one thing — streaming video, right? Whereas Apple is a company where the main thing they do is Macintosh,” Hoddie commented. “So it’s hard to compete with a company that’s doing exactly one thing if you’re a company like Apple or like Microsoft.”
Hoddie joined Apple in August of 1989 and climbed the ranks to ultimately become senior QuickTime architect. He left the company in February 2000.