NPR's Car Talk Dumping RealMedia

olcrazypete writes: "Click and Clack are apparently fed up with Real Networks. They have switched to Windows Media Player format. 'Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we finally decided to take action.' The whole story is here . My favorite line: 'It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?'"

Comments

Re:So why not QuickTime?

[Graff]

On my Windows XP boxes, QuickTime has been remarkably unstable through three major and countless minor releases. Crashes, weird artifacts that linger for the duration of playback, "corrupted" files that played fine under Win2K...

Yeah, imagine that. It makes you wonder why Quicktime has problems under Windows. I mean, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Quicktime competes with Windows Media Player, could it? There's no way Microsoft would stoop so low as to make Quicktime work badly on its systems! I mean it's not like anyone else ever had similar problems with Microsoft, right?

Sarcasm aside, maybe the answer is not to move towards a Windows Media Player solution for authoring, but rather away from it. If these guys have complaints about Real's actions with Real Player then they really should take a good hard look at the actions Microsoft has taken in the software market before they move to Windows Media Player.