MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Mon, 06 Nov 2006

Plays for Sure: not! There are a lot of developers out there who really don't trust M$ for reasons like this - they push one "standard" and then unexpectedly (and sometimes inexplicably) shift to another, leaving those with investments in the first stranded.

But, as Bill G. & Co. discovered with the Internet, that can also play against you. There are an awful lot of devices that are compatible with the Plays For Sure "standard" - with a significant number of customers. Zune is gonna hafta be pretty darn cool to get these folks to pony up, and the media available for it had better be pretty broad and deep. Even with $90 billion (or some ridiculous amount) of cash in the bank, M$ cannot afford to keep this going forever if it flops out of the gate.

It's going to be an interesting holiday shopping season.

Customers of Microsoft's MSN Music store could face problems if they try to move tracks to a Zune player.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 11/7/2006 08:56:34
Arwin wrote

Imitation...

On 11/7/2006 09:17:23
Arwin wrote

Imitation....

the sincerest form of flattery. M$ is just copying the Apple strategy. From the article Dave links to: Microsoft's strategy for Zune replicates that of Apple's iPod - to control both the device and music service. This lack of interoperability is the only thing I hate about iPod/iTunes. It is a pain to have to burn the WMA or AAC files and then rip them back to MP3 so I can play the music I purchase where I want. I'm not particularly a M$ fan, but it seems sometimes M$ is damned if they do and damned if they don't when it comes to changing standards. A lot of M$'s problems with Windoz is backwards compatibility. I can't weep too much for M$. I'm sure Bill G. is weeping all the way to the bank. No matter what Bill does to the customers they seem to keep coming back for more.... me included. Maybe next time I'll go Linux.

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Dave Haxton's Weblog
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