May 3rd, 2011

Esperanto vs. WebM

Last week Microsoft compared Google's decision to remove the industry standard video codec, H.264, from the built-in HTML5 spec in their Chrome web browser in favor of the open-source WebM video codec, to trying to switch from English to Esperanto.

Esperanto was created in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof to be an easy-to-learn, politically neutral language in hopes that it would foster peace through international understanding. It was violently opposed by both Hitler and Stalin because they felt it threatened their totalitarian regimes.

WebM is an open-source and freely licensed video codec that Google hopes will spur online innovation by making it more available to individual developers. It's opposed by Microsoft and Apple (among others) because it threatens the income stream the receive from licencing H.264 to content producers / publishers.

Whether or not this ends up being a good move for Google remains to be seen, but I'd say that the comparison was unintentionally one of the smarter statements that Microsoft has made in quite some time.