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Microsoft Confirms New Music Player
Udo Schmitz writes "It's official now. Reuters confirms the rumors that Microsoft wants to take on Apple's iPod and iTunes. From the article: 'Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it plans to release a new music and entertainment player and accompanying software under the "Zune" brand this year, in a belated attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod player ... Microsoft sources said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, is working with J. Allard, vice president of its Xbox team, on the digital media player/software project.'"
In keeping with each system's naming conventions:
Apple:
iTunes
Microsoft:
My Zunes
In other words, Microsoft is even ripping off the name, but making it crappier.
when MS announce they are going to compete with apple in this market, and Apples shares go up?
And it is not a media device, it is a lifestyle device...sheeesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Part of the reason ITunes is popular (and one of the reasons that I use Winamp instead of WMP) is that the user interface for Windows Media Player sucks. Likewise, Firefox isn't only more functional than IE, it also just looks and feels better and cleaner. Even if "Zunes" had a better name, a seemless interface with online music stores, and no annoying DRM gimmicks, I would probably still pick another media player. Because Microsoft's UI's just suck. Microsoft's been sitting around waiting for the past 5-10 years for someone to come along with sleaker media players and browsers (and a cleaner OS), and now it's paying the price.
They may do their weird, dark deals with companies like Viacom to distribute wmedia only.
Oh wait, they do already.
"Unfortunately, Microsoft's Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not support Windows DRM. If DRM support becomes available for Macintosh, MTV will develop a version of MTV Overdrive that works on a Mac."
If a company needs exclusive deals like that, their format stinks. It is not their format even, they acquired dozens of codec companies and packaged them into some sort of naziware which never worked on other OS'es except their windows. If you don't use their OS, you get punished.
You know what makes me mad? Those videos are more likely cut, edited and processed on Mac. I wouldn't be surprised if they used Telestream pro products to produce that windows media on OS X even.
Now you would tell me Apple does not make iTunes for Linux. Well, Real just SPOKE about enabling DRM on Linux/FreeBSD and you see what happened and the feedback they got.
I am glad Apple Quicktime Division and Real Networks still alive competing with that mafia style company...
and protein folding, rocket engineering, and military battlefield simulations, and automobile computers, and telephone switching, and cell phone software - woah...practically everything in the economy nowadays involves a software problem.......does that mean Microsoft should be dominating all those software markets too? The consumer market for software is not just one industry, but many industries.
Sure, Microsoft is shrewd at annhilating competition sometimes. But the beauty of capitalism is that even though every transaction is ultimately motivated by self-interest, each transaction benefits both sides - the buyer and the seller - not just the seller. And with the kind of dirty attitude Microsoft displays, it appears that the company views the consumer as a means to an end, not an end in itself. They are not concerned with the interests of the consumer. If they were, they wouldn't be so hell-bent on destroying Google. Rather, they would observe that Google is good at what it does, and so a) they should either stay out of the enterprise search business altogether or 2) try to keep healthy competition with Google alive so as to serve the costumers along with themselves. And I'm not talking the kind of lop-sided competition Microsoft forced Apple into during the 90's.
Unfortunately, this kind of equanimous attitude doesn't really play a role among corporate strategists, and hasn't for quite some time. Instead, the prevailing attitude seems to be: overwhelm your opponents so they die; enter new markets and conquer them; don't do *one* thing really well - do many things moderately well, or even poorly. Eventually this kind of attitude is not meaningfully different from a conspiracy against the consumer. It's sad that this is the way it's going, not just with Microsoft but with other corporate giants. The whole point of the antitrust ruling and antitrust legislation was to stop this kind of behavior.
And I think that this behavior has its origin in a kind of slave morality that entrepeneurs have. The market is hard to survive in. Businesses start off small. They have fight their way tooth and nail to the top. But once they get there, they should shift their attitude to one commensurate with their new situation. After all, they are no longer in an environment where the market is a threatening force. They are no longer burdened by the possibility of extinction. However, you see it over and over again: people, having achieved power, fail to shift their attitude. In some sense, they still view themselves as the little guy, threatened by competition. They need to keep expanding into new markets, because if they don't they will be crushed. There is some very basic confusion going on, and it's built in to the way corporations are structured - executives are hired and fired based on their ability to devise new ways to crush competition. If they fail to return staggering growth, they are gone.
Unfettered growth for a select few corporations doesn't help anyone. It stifles innovation, obstructs the free market, and skews the overall composition of our society against the individual.
There's already a Wikipedia article covering this a bit, including a prototype picture. Not only is it very iPod-looking, but given that prototypes tend to be slick artist concept work often looking better than the end product, I'm not really impressed. :-/ Comparison picture as a reminder of what they're dealing with. Sure, it's just a prototype, but it simply can't look anything like that. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Apple needs to get Bonjour playlist sharing on iPods like it works on iTunes on a laptop when you wander into a wireless network with other people with iTunes sharing on. Forget video, iPods sharing with each other would be the killer feature to take iPods to the next level. Think of the social impact too-- a girl on a subway giving you a little smile and pointing to her iPod as she listens to your shared playlist (I guess that's for version 2.0 when you can fit a base station in an iPod for an ad-hoc wireless network, but still).
I hate to see Microsoft get there first and mess it up, but if it gets the iPod team moving on this, competition is good...