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Gates v. Jobs, continued...
FJCsar writes "The New York Times has an interesting story about the continuing battle between Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple's iTunes from the perspectives of both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs."
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There was, of course, the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. It was broadcast exactly once, during the 1984 Super Bowl
Ummm, it's not exactly true. Super Bowl commercials are often broadcast the year before in obscure local stations to be eligible for the same year awards. The "1984" commercial was aired on 1 AM in Twin Falls, Idaho on December 15, 1983. Of course the question is - can you actually BROADcast anything in Idaho...
But M$ has a huge hammer to rely upon. They will start making Itunes break everytime there is a MS Update run. While making the Windows Media Player more similar to Itunes. Pretty soon it won't be worth the hassle to keep Itunes running right.
I bought songs with itunes music store..I have an ipod, I butned ausio cds, life was good..
Then I got a car with a cd mp3 player... And thats where things started to crumble. I coulldn't burn mp3 cds with songs I had bought , only songs I had ripped. I could convert them to mp3s, but its time consuming. If I was using real/microsoft I would have the same problem. So all my purchased itunes songs are on regular cds.
While I understand apples need to include DRM to keep music b iz people happy, unless the DRM is ubiqitous its not going to work well, Even MS is going to have trouble doing this.
DRM free is the way to go..
Just the very nature of the programs are the technological embodiment of Jobs and Gates.
iTunes: Steve Jobs is overall a very straightforward guy who values simplicity over all else. Things should just work without a lot of hassle. We can argue all day if iTunes is the best jukebox or not but at least it represents what Jobs wants out of software. Something that does the job well without a whole lot of fuss.
Windows Media Player: Gates has always played catch-up to Steve Jobs. You know deep down he is envious of Jobs. Gates seems like that kid at school who didn't fit in but tried really, really hard by trying to impress everybody with his gadgets and his knowledge. But overall nobody cares.
Gates wants to desperately wave his hand and say "This IS the media player you are looking for! Why, you ask. One, because I said so! Two, because it does everything you could ever want on a computer. It plays music, movies, it slices, it dices, it makes mounds of juliene potatoes. And three, because I said so bitch! (apologies to Rick James)"
It just always comes across that Gates introduces stuff to try impress people by throwing a lot of stuff into products. Unfortunately, more is not necessarily better. Keep trying Bill.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
But M$ has a huge hammer to rely upon. They will start making Itunes break everytime there is a MS Update run. While making the Windows Media Player more similar to Itunes. Pretty soon it won't be worth the hassle to keep Itunes running right.
I have two thoughts on this. First, MS updates will break a lot of things, not just iTunes. I constantly hear horror stories of how each update breaks some program or another. Granted, it may break iTunes a bit "harder", but that's a price to pay. I also wonder if Apple could say "look, these guys are acting very uncompetitively and intentionally breaking our software".
Second...the reason many people don't switch from PCs to Macs is because of all the software they have for their PCs and they don't feel like buying all new software, etc. The same argument could hold true for the iPod. With dominance of the market and their own format, iPod owners may not make the switch to other players and formats for the same reason as PC users sticking with that platform.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
==
"Now the problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you often succeed." -
iTunes currently requires version 4.2 as a minimum to play any DRM'd songs you have purchased from the store. This means you have to be running Windows 2000, XP, Mac OS 10.2.x, 10.3.x to play your music.
2 years from now, those restrictions could change to requiring a theoretical iTunes 5.0 which would theoretically require Windows XP & Longhorn and Mac OS 10.4.x & 10.5.x.
Even if iTunes remains free, I'll eventually have to pay $199 for the next version of Windows or $129 for the next version of Mac OS X (and possibly a new Mac supportable by the OS X version) to continue to play music I purchased from the iTMS this year and can play this year.
MP3 files, however, will play on any playback app that supports them, regardless of the OS or the age of the hardware, long after my iPod dies.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Gates predicts his company will dominate music as his company dominates in the operating system arena.
But this is an entirely new battlefield, and he is making predictions based on what he has done in a separate area, one that he, as the computer wars begun, could not have foreseen at all, and can only preach of in retrospect.
Microsoft is not in full control of what he sells--the music. Nor does Jobs. However, Apple sells music in a manner that both music companies feel exhibits some level of control to minimize easy copying and tracking of sold music as well as getting them a cut. (Having a large marketshare in selling music players that access said music store is good for business, too.) People feel more in control of what they buy in the iTunes music store.
Microsoft and other companies have a more draconian DRM than Apple's that greatly restricts how to receive music and where it can be placed. There's also the matter of several, different, and confusing music stores that all use different music players and, as a result, lead to a confusing buying purchase. Place Windows at the center of this morass of players and stores and you have Too Many Cooks Looking for Profit, Inc.
Gates, like Jobs, knows what has happened in the past. But Jobs learns from his lessons and has shown a certain business shrewness of late that Gates and others have yet to truly match today. It's this fact, and not old computer history, that will determine which is the stronger businessman of tomorrow. Want some prediction? Look at Apple's stock price over the last 3 years and compare it to the same earning trend to Microsoft. Or Dell. Or HP. Or Adobe. Or Oracle. Or IBM.
I feel that Gates in the past was in the right place, pulling the right strings at the right time. Jobs, historically, has been in the right place at the right time while creating ideas or greatly tweaking old ones to generate a new product at a time when no one else was thinking of such things.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
- Would works with Macs!
- Would have DRM that allows watching a downloaded movie for a whole week
- Would support two pricing structures: 99 cents for a low resolution movie (perhaps 450x250 pixels) and $2.50 for a higher resolution movie (perhaps 800x500 pixels). Support full screen mode with interpolation.
I really enjoy Apple's music store. The current online movie rental (via download with DRM) stores look fairly lame - I bet that Apple could create someting that I would enjoy using.-Mark
I guess if open standards win then iriver has already won. Rockbox firmware http://www.rockbox.org coming soon will bust open the iriver's true potential! they already got the lcd screen to display their custom code... 140mhz motorolla coldfire cpu and 32mb sdram should be enough to handle any codecs you throw at it... :D looks like next year will be a good year for me.. and a bad year for ipod owners.
One more thing:
:-) and that is fine for people who want to own movies forever. For myself, I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to get movies on demand loaded on to my laptop for viewing on my deck, etc. Being able to pause movies, watch them several times within the DRM timeout period, etc. would be great.
I think that there could be a lot of variability in pricing for download with DRM movies: obviously new releases would cost more and may not be available for a while in a higher resolution. Perhaps deals could be made for much lower costs for older movies (like Turner Classics).
Sometimes old movies come up in conversation and it would be great to have an online library of 10s of thousands of movies.
My older brother owns about 1200 movie DVDs (to keep this anonymous I won't mention Ron's name
Netflix is a good idea, but there is not the immediacy of deciding to watch a move and then have it available in a short while. (I am assuming that after buffering up data for 20 minutes or so that a Quicktime movie would then play OK with most broadband services.)
For a number of reasons:
1. Apple got there first and successfully staked out the market for such a device on both the hardware and software level.
2. The iPod is a technically superior device with excellent user controls and the ability to have no loss of sound quality when manipulating the controls on the iPod.
3. Apple smartly knew that if they really wanted market share for the iPod they have to be Windows compatible, hence the fact newer iPods have USB 2.0 connections in addition to IEEE-1394 connections.
Mind you, I think Apple should seriously consider developing future-generation iPods with user-changeable batteries and possibly an AM/FM tuner.
My mother-in-law is technically illiterate, but she's just got herself (at the age of 65) a degree in English with Religious Studies. She thinks Bill Gates is wonderful.
One day she said ,"But he's made computers easy to use..."
"But you see, he hasn't..." I replied.
Bill Gates provided, in WIndows 95, a much-needed backwards-compatible upgrade to MS-DOS. He may have made MS-DOS PeeCees easier to use than before, but I need not point out the history of computing here on slashdot.
Bill Gates has done a remarkable job of pulling the wool over they eyes of the average member of the public without more than a passing interest in computers.
These people are his fans.
Stick Men
Interestingly, it looks as though IBM has taken the line "Hardware is what you have (and if we're lucky, you'll pay us loads for it), Software is what you use (you can pay for it, or we'll let have Linux), but Services is what you need (Confused? We'll put it all together for you, and make it work. At a price)
So maybe in time people will regard Microsoft as "just a software company"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It didn't stop Novell from getting half a billion from Microsoft last week for pulling that very stunt.
The only reason you can't play iTunes DRM music on older versions of iTunes is that the DRM scheme wasn't in use yet, and of course software created before the creation of a standard won't support that standard. However, the songs purchased from iTMS have never been "upgraded" (so to speak) to require a higher version of iTunes than what was used to purchase it in the first place. So, if you bought songs with iTMS, and you've never upgraded your copy of iTunes since then, they still work. So I don't see Apple releasing upgrades as such a big problem.
A bigger problem, in my mind anyway, with the DRM is this: Imagine, 3 years from now, Apple, or iTMS, or both, fail, and I buy a new machine that runs some other hypothetical operating system, and no existing version of iTunes will run on it, what do I do then? I have to keep an old OSX/Windows machine around just to listen to a few CDs I bought on iTMS? Or will it then be legal to break the DRM?
It gets to be a little like the problem of: I have a bunch of data on old 5.25" floppies, but new computers don't have floppy drives, only with the difference that it would be illegal to copy it to a more reasonable medium. So, you see, my worry isn't so much that Apple will continue to upgrade their software, but that there will come a time when they won't continue to update their software.
I think Apple got it right with iTunes when they decided against the subscription model. I think people do want to own their media rather than pay a monthly fee for access to media.
It is the content-owning corporations and distributers with no hardware to sell who would love to see the subscription model succeed, not the consumers.
The reason is simple: the subscription model is the holy grail for corporations because it affords them a predictable, guaranteed revenue stream. In business, you can't beat that model.
It is the way cable television is sold. Given that I watch little television, I would prefer to pay only for the programs I watch. But, I'm not given that choice. I have to sign up for a monthly subscription for a ton of channels I never watch.
So, I hope that long term Apple is right and Microsoft is wrong regarding subscription services. When they begin to distribute movies on line, I would rather see an iTunes-like model as rather than another another monthly bill. Some months I buy music, some months I don't. Ditto for movies. On-line distribution should allow for this choice.
I have never ever met someone having any problems at all moving music to their iPod.
Almost everyone I have met that use Microsoft technology have serious problem moving their music to their WMA players.
The Apple/iTunes/iPod works.
The Microsoft/WMA/whatever doesn't.
And at the distribution end, there is more bliss: "I never would have believed I would say this, but Microsoft has been easy to work with," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Recorded Music.
Big surprise, the record company guys are ignorant and/or blinded by greed. Microsoft is always nice and easy to work with, until they have what they need from you. Then they yank down your pants and bend you over.
The list of companies Microsoft has "partnered" with and then screwed is a long one. Expect more names on it in the near future:
Then: "We've been working and have gotten a lot of traction in this space for a long while," said David Caulton, group manager for the Windows Media division, adding that Microsoft has no plans for a competing service. "We're still very comfortable with the strategy of enabling lots and lots of partners to build these things, rather than build a closed proprietary service on our own."
Now: "Oh, we changed our mind about not opening our own music store. Sorry!"
FM transmitters are just as bad - the maximum frequency is limited to 15 kHz, and the stereo seperation is poor due to the multiplexing of the L-R signal onto the 38kHz pilot tone.
Yes, these things are vitally important when you're inside a thin metal box full of bits of odd furniture and strange surfaces, with speakers wedged into odd corners wherever they can be fitted, the whole thing being moved by a powerplant putting out many dBs of noise and vibration, with other similar ones going past every few seconds, plus the variable levels of white noise caused by the airflow. Hmmm, I'm sure you can pick out the difference between 40 and 50 dB of stereo separation, or the fact that the high frequencies are rolling off a few kHz early.
Personally, I find the iTrip more than adequate for car use. The quality isn't bad at all once you get the right levels and an appropriate equalizer setting dialled in (I found it needed quite a bit of treble boost for my car). Yes, on my home hifi the iTrip's drawbacks are fairly obvious, but in the car it's fine.
It's not IBM and MS vs Apple. Its Apple and HP and the music companies vs MS and Dell and the music companies
Not only that, but in the desktop harware arena, IBM is on Apple's side now.