I'm not a software developer, and haven't worked in that field for
some years (he said, happily), but unless I'm completely wrong,
Windows XP/2K and Windows 98 are pretty different beasts
once you turn them over and start inspecting their scaly
underbellies.
Not only does iTunes deal with firewire and USB2 and CD burners and
sound devices and other voodoo, but it also incorporates Rendezvous
(zeroconf)-based local automatic sharing between macs and PCs --
something I didn't expect to see at all in the first release -- and
otherwise duplicates the behavior of iTunes for the Mac OS exactly,
feature for feature.
For free, on the first release.
I'm just a bush league techie when it comes to Windows, but it
strikes me that the options available were probably something like
this: Release a version of iTunes that works in Win 98 and NT/XP/2K
that has less features, costs more to support (while making no
money in return), and would probably lag behind the mac version of
iTunes owing to its much more bloated codebase and larger support
team.... or release a full version that works only in Win 2K/XP and
can keep pace with the mac version, while draining a minimum of
money from a company that, after all, has to compete with
Microsoft.
(That sentence should probably be dragged into the street and
shot.)
Yes, in an ideal world, you'd get both. But this is the alternate
branch of history that ended up electing Dubya to the presidency,
and personally I'm happy we got any version of iTunes for Windows
at all, for free, period. God knows, precious little else has gone
right, recently.
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