iPod Most Popular Music Player on Microsoft Campus

bblazer writes "Wired is running an article about how despite the displeasure of management, the iPod is the most popular music player on the Microsoft campus. The article states that 80% of those who have digital music players have an iPod. Employees have even started using different headphones to be a bit more stealthy about it."

Comments

Representative of Microsoft's "vision"

[Gob Blesh It]

The Microsoft employee's open letter to Bill Gates almost made me choke. In case you haven't read it, let me paraphrase: "How do we make an iPod killer?" he asks rhetorically. "First we must harness the blogosphere!" he answers. "Then we'll design the interface by committee. Synergize, baby."

Anyway, I found it interesting how clearly the note reveals (what seems to be) Microsoft's general thought process. Never lead, always follow. I mean, how pathetic is this sort of blatant, shameless me-tooism? While innovators like Apple are trying to build the future, Microsoft employees like this guy are trying desperately to catch up... and they still can't figure out how.

Just my two cents from an Apple fanboy. Flame on...

Re:Representative of Microsoft's "vision"

[eln]

Well, while your characterization of Apple as a ceaseless innovator may be a little over the top, you do have a point about Microsoft, one that demonstrates the dangers inherent in a monopoly or oligopoly controlled industry.

Microsoft doesn't innovate because they don't NEED to innovate. They know that they can be late to the party on a particular feature or product, and they will still be able to capture the majority of the market, because they can offer two things that no one else can possibly provide:
1.) the strength of the Microsoft name, and
2.) Seamless integration with Windows, a family of operating systems that over 90% of the public uses, and which only one company has full access to the internals of: Microsoft.

If the innovation does not fit into a category that can be exploited in this way, Microsoft can either purchase and rebrand the technology, or develop their own clones and bury the competition in predatory pricing and overwhelming marketing.

Why bother to innovate when it's so much easier not to?

Re:Representative of Microsoft's "vision"

[Geekenstein]

Being a copycat has always been a strategic business move. Let some other company develop a product, spend countless revisions figuring out what doesn't work, have lots of expensive bombs and R&D costs. Then you simply make a cheaper version of the sucessful product without comitting your own resources to forging the path.

That, my friend, is known as smart business.

Need an example? Here's a quick one. Tivo and the satellite/cable PVRs. The content providers can do it cheaper, because they don't have those large R&D bills. Tivo, on the other hand, has to produce the product, pay the expenses incurred, and still somehow make a profit.

The innovator is usually the one who ends up going out of business. Apple is (currently) the exception.

Re:Representative of Microsoft's "vision"

[Leo McGarry]

So apple invented the hard drive based mp3 player?

Basically, yeah.

You know who invented the automobile? Depending on how you define the term, there are as many as half a dozen possible answers, none of them later than 1893.

But do you know who really invented the automobile, for all practical purposes? That's right. Henry Ford, in 1908.

Apple is to the iPod as Henry Ford is to the car.

Insight into the campus here...

[kneecarrot]

I actually work for Microsoft (gasp! and I also read Slashdot!). My cube-mate owns an iPod. I remember the week after MSN Music was launched, he took his iPod with him into the cafeteria. He was waiting in line to grab his lunch and noticed that people kept cutting in front of him in line. He couldn't figure out what the heck was going on until he realized the people cutting in front were all from the music division. They had seen the white earphones and were "punishing" him for going with the competitor.
Sometimes people can be very petty here.

Re:Why iPod anyway?

[dknight]

while PDAs have decent general-purpose use battery life these days, mp3s kill them pretty quick. besides that, they're still generally bigger than an ipod... pdas also tend to be more expensive and you still wind up with less space than an ipod.

Amazing that corp security allows them

[winkydink]

A 40Gb writable device that easily attaches to one's computer.

Re:Why iPod anyway?

[pdbogen]

Interestingly enough: The lack of a good player, no worthwhile eyes-off interface, and battery life. My iPod lasts a lot longer than my PDA would, if my PDA were playing music (empirical evidence)

That, and a 1GB SD card comes up on Froogle for $54. This is a third the price of the 1GB iPod shuffle, but does not include the cost of the playing device, which is almost certainly at least $100.

So, you've got a comparably priced solution, with a worse interface, and shorter battery life. Of course, a PDA is still a PDA, in the end.. So it really depends on what feature set you are most interested in.

Anyway, I have a 40GB iPod, which would be about $2,200 in SD cards, and it cost me less than $200 (thanks, freeipods.com)

Re:Bill buys Apple?

[Alan Partridge]

It's not a bit like Coke employees drinking Pepsi (which they'd be pretty dumb to do as they'd probably have access to all the free Coke they wanted). iPod is a neo-Walkman, the only way it threatens MS is in the fact that it totally ignores their pointless, me-too, proprietary .wma crapmat.

Re:Huh?

[colanut]

It is interesting because (from the goddamn article):

So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.

Microsoft doesn't currently make hardware, but the sure as hell make a competing media format. Balmer and co have made a lot of noise about the iPod as well. But the point is, how can you make an Apple killer if your own employees are using the competition.

Re:I wonder...

[SpottedKuh]

[F]ast food workers never want to eat where they have worked.

I have never worked in fast food, but I have worked in the food-preparation industry. And I can say that I am leery about eating anything from my former employer; and, it has nothing to do with hatred toward my employer. While it was only a summer job to get me through my first year of university, I had an excellent employer and the pay was good. Unfortunately, I saw the kind of sanitation practices that took place during the preparation of food (including, for example, people touching food with licked fingers).

[P]eople who work at many factories refuse to buy products from that factory.

This time I speak not from my own experience, but from that of a good friend of mine who worked at a pipe-fitting factory. While the factory and its management had strict safety protocols (regarding both its employees and its finished products), most employees blatently disregarded those protocols. Many close calls (including falling pipes barely missing people and chemical spills being sealed just in time) resulted from the lax attitude of most employees toward those protocols. More important for the consumer, though, many employees tried to slack off as much as possible, resulting in many pipes that were cracked or otherwise unusable, but were only discovered during the final phase of product quality checks. Arguably, with such an attitude prevalent, some faulty products must make it out of the factory. Hence, I would understand anyone's unease at buying from such a factory after seeing first hand (or, in my case, hearing second-hand) about the safety violations.

Of course, one could argue that such issues would exist at almost any factory or any fast food restaurant (or, almost anywhere, quite frankly), but I suppose something about our perception of a particular location changes after having experienced the issues up close.

Re:I wonder...

[Quasar1999]

No... Fast food workers refuse to eat where they work for 2 reasons, first they know what goes in the food (scary stuff), and second they are sick of the taste and smell of it.

Factory workers on the other hand... well, let's break that up, those who work in factories that produce foods, they once again see what goes into it... (that's very scary stuff, I've seen what goes into most cookies and crackers... most of the ingredients are also found in windex...) Now as for the other group, they simply know the flaws in the products their factory produces...

In the case of Microsoft, their employees tried their product, found it inferior, and moved on. Don't forget, MS is a huge company, and you'll note the article specifically mentions that the media group is all using MS based players... that's probably due to fear of losing your job, rather than thinking your product is superior... but anyways...

What I'm trying to get at, is that the don't feel hatred to their employeers as the parent tried to imply, they simply know a little too much about the product produced...

Shhhhh... don't say it...!

[PCM2]

Could it be ... could it be you've come up with a worthwhile reason why we have patents?

Re:Bill buys Apple?

[jsebrech]

WMA is entirely ms-owned and not standardized, fairplay is a layer over MPEG4/AAC, which is standardized and not under apple's control.

Re:Bill buys Apple?

[ThousandStars]

There is also the other factor of exposure to Apple products. The more consumers that buy Apple iPods, the more that may just buy a Mac Mini, eMac, iMac, iBook or PowerBook. That means less revenue to MS for their OS cash-cow.

I seriously doubt MS is even remotely worried about this, since Apple would have to have five or ten times its present sales to even make a small dent. More importantly, I doubt any corporate clients are going to go Apple just because of the iPod and mini. Besides, they probably make as much if not more money from Apple users than they do from Windows users because of the price of MSO:Mac and VPC -- both of which I bought.

Most importantly, however, MS can pull the plug on Apple anytime they want by eliminating MSO:Mac. Fact is, a whole lot of people, myself included, exist in a world dominated by MSO and need to interact with it; if Office:Mac didn't exist, I wouldn't own a PowerBook. Hell, if VPC didn't exist I probably wouldn't, because I also need Access.

Any time MS wants to, they can effectively kill, or at least really marginalize, Apple with their MSO weapon.