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The Partnership That Could Have Changed Everything
DesertBlade writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, at one point, Microsoft had considered an Apple/iPod partnership before it released its own MP3 player. Microsoft was apparently displeased with MP3 players partnerships they had already made, notably the Creative and Dell models. This information came from court documents introduced in an antitrust lawsuit from Iowa. From the article: 'Microsoft had been working with partners on music devices for at least a year before Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and catapulted to a dominant position in the market. Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.' If this Apple/Microsoft partnership was formed how would this have changed the Microsoft and Apple dynamics?"
if Apple and M$ had teemed up, wouldn't that just loose the lawyers en mass?
If they teamed up, we would have Windows running on Macs. Oh, wait...
...and you will be treated to the comment that's going to be my next .SIG line here.
"Longhorn is a pig!" -- Jim Allchin
And this was said when Allchin was heading up development on Longhorn. Hilarious if it weren't true, even more hilarious because it is.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"Hey! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!"
"You got peanut butter in my chocolate!"
In this case, though, read "strychnine" instead of "peanut butter".
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
...the only alliances Apple makes with Microsoft are those alliances that they absolutely MUST make..ie...MS Office. Apple does anything and everything to maintain complete control of their products and services thus assuring a stable, efficient, elegant design and pleasurable experience. I seriously doubt Apple would ever have given more than a few minutes at best to a thought about partnering with MS in the music space.
This would NEVER have happend, no matter how hard MS pursued it.
AC
I don't care how much money M$ would have thrown into the deal, Steve Jobs would never have allowed this. Apple is cool and M$ is an aging old bear. Everybody wants to partner with Apple but nobody wants to partner with M$.
Microsoft in a pink skirt.
...Here we are, with Microsoft having rejected other manufacturers' hardware as deficient, going it alone, and still coming out with a laughably bad product, even after having all that time to learn from both the successes and failures of others.
Admittedly, most of Apple's competition seem to have great difficulty getting their head round what seems to me a very simple proposition (make it nice to use and nice to hold, like an iPod, but make it do stuff an iPod can't), so it's not just Microsoft at fault here, but yet again I find myself wondering what the hell their problem is. Sometimes it seems like they just don't want to get it right.
Although it's probably a good thing that this partnership came about. Because if you think the iPod has a monopoly now, imagine what it would have been like with Microsoft shoving it down everybody's throats. And imagine how little the product wuold have improved over time - I mean, Apple spent the last couple of years sitting on their hands and not implementing relatively trivial features like gapless playback, because they could get away with not bothering. Recently the competition's started to get their act together and they're making noticeable improvements to the iPod line. But we all know what happens when MS is the only show in town, don't we? Not a whole lot, that's what.
I would hope Apple has learned to be wary of any 'partnerships' that Microsoft may offer them. And given how they left all their partners in PlayforSure holding the bag, it looks like nothings really changed.
I doubt it would've changed much as whatever they would've come up with, most likley being different than the I-pod is today, wouldn't have been as popular. I'd imagine lawyers woulda have the ultimate field day with connecting the dots for anti-trust violations and M$ and/or Apple would've backed away saying "Just joshin, we'll make humourous commercials instead."
Although the whole "what-if" scenario will still get to those who bother. If anything derived from such a past-possible parternship was indeed sucessful, any more collaboration probably would develop over a much longer-term period of time.
Unless of course, it were to just own everything on the planet, which in the literal sense of the word, M$ aspires to and Apple likes to own hardware and sell it at fairly expensive prices while both buy/own into the flawed concept of DRM.
The thought of a Win-Pod, or I-win (perhaps Irwin?) is funny though.
Needless to say, I'm bored right now ... XD
*continues the 9 to 5*
We'd probably have gotten a situation where Apple developed a version of the iPod for the Mac, and MS developed one for Windows. My guess is that the Windows version would have been tied into WMP, while Apple would have gone with iTunes. It would have been a mess. I seriously doubt MS would have allowed support for AAC+ on their version, while Apple would have shunned WMA. The market would have been split between the two companies, and the iPod would have likely been a failure. One of the reasons the iPod took off (other than its UI) was the fact that it works across both Macs and PCs. Another reason is the simple design of iTMS. It just works. I seriously doubt that MS could have developed something similar, and they would have stuck their fingers into iTMS just enough to ruin it. Look at the Zune. MS has had years to pick the iPod and iTMS apart, and this is the best they can do? Pathetic.
How about a MS product that won't give you a BSOD?
I'm glad the mods were wise enough to mod you down - any OS can suffer that - in Unix and Linux it's called a Kernel Panic. And yes, I've seen enough Kernel pancis in Linux to know that it can happen in any OS...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Reading the article, it seems this wasn't a partnership deal being considered so much as Microsoft wishfully thinking they could convince Apple to interoperate with Microsoft. I can sit in my office and dream of "what if..." scenarios where I partner with Apple or Cisco or IBM, but if I were to approach any of them I can't expect more than being laughed at.
This Bloomberg article says more about Microsoft's sense of desperation than anything.
Really, what does it matter?
but I don't think apple would have considered microsoft.
So... essentially all this news article is saying, or rather... proposing, is "what if Microsoft and Apple teamed up for the iPod."
Really just one thing.
1. There wouldn't be a Zune.
Considering the way the Zune has been selling, that point doesn't even count.
FTFA: ... also suggested he talk to Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft's media software for fear the iPod would "drive people away from Windows Media Player.''
Allchin,
Why would Apple have agreed to that? What would have been in it for them? In 2003 (when the article seems to indicate the above took place) the iPod was taking off without any help from Microsoft and had been available for Windows since August of 2002. There is no advantage to having the iPod use WMP on Windows machines instead of iTunes. It would have meant that a team of Microsofties would have had to work closely with Apple and likely have had access to privileged information about the iPod to get it to work with WMP.
That sounds an awful lot like many partnerships Microsoft did in the past: They work with a company, get a good look at the company's closely-guarded crown jewels, and then 'change their mind' about doing what the partnership set out to accomplish. And then a little while later they use the information gleaned during the partnership to come up with a competing product and sink the other company, using high-priced lawyers and weasel clauses buried in contracts to avoid any penalty.
They already pulled that bit on Apple once when they developed Windows by copying the Mac while they had access to a few prototypes to develop Mac apps, and then hid behind a terribly vague licensing agreement. I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
~Philly
Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.'
I'm just wondering why did they have problems connecting to computers? What the voodoo techniques didn't work? They needed more chicken's feet? Surely you connect via USB2 (or other fast connection protocol) and hook into a piece of software that's already cataloged the drive for music files. How is that so hard for a company with so many crack programmers and engineers? I don't understand but then again I didn't RTFA.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Apple, not being a monopoly, let alone an illegal monopoly is unable to push the bounds of monopolistic behavior.
Please remember that the only reason Microsoft is limited in the way it is is because it is a large organisation which has indulged in illegal behavior. If we weren't using strict legal terminology, we might call it organized crime.
I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
Change that to "I don't think Jobs would fall for it," as it was not him who fell for it the first time-- Jobs was gone from Apple in November of 1985 when Sculley signed the agreement with Microsoft.
~Philly
connecting a computer to a mobile device, and transferring the music?
How ridiculous is this for a multi-billion dollar company like MS?
Honestly, I can't just believe this claim. If anything, they disabled everything about the connection protocol they used until it couldn't transfer music anymore (hey, the Zune is almost there, and can't even use its own WLAN for data transfer!).
It would-ve been lame.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
That's unfair, Linux is a fragile kernel as well.
Any other UNIX should only panic when flaky hardware is involved
Microsoft needs to figure out a few things to do well, leave others to do what they are best at without interference and be happy that those apps will be ported to the Windows platform. The whole idea that a developer has to cut Microsoft in on a piece of the action sounds a bit like the way the mob works and it scares the hell out of everyone.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wasn't the iPod still shipped with Musicmatch for WIndows use instead of iTunes in part of 2003? I know the transition to Windows iTunes was pretty quick, but it seems like it might have been around then.
Even so I agree that Apple had little to gain from an arrangement like that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"If this Apple/Microsoft partnership was formed how would this have changed the Microsoft and Apple dynamics?
Yes, Microsoft would have found a way to screw Apple over like it has with just about every "partner" they have ever had and the two would be locked in a legal battle over it.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
... before it released it's own MP3 player.it's == "it is" (always)
its == belonging to
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
How different is Apple products from any other "embedded" enclosed system that is sold to and running in a manufacturing and production environment? Sampling, analysis "products" etc, these do NOT provide SDK's and API's for "customising" wheras Apple DOES for OS X.
I see no difference at all, except that Apple is MORE open than these (process control | sampling | analysis | automation) "system"s that are available.
I guess my thought would be related to MS' ability to push out DRM, license content, and other stuff. I guess in 2001, I saw no ability on their part to push out ground breaking stuff at any clip. At the time I think it would have been difficult for even MW to come up with a credible DRM platform on the desktop. Further I'm not sure they can execute on a strategy of low end consumer devices where the profit is made in content which they can somehow get in position to license. Yeah, I suppose one might observe that they did this with O/S sw, but I don't think it is the same thing for content. Think about it, although I know given the same innvovative nature as Apple they could have easily convinced BMG, Columbia, etc into licensing, and they would have been great at pressuring the labels, but they would have failed totally on the platform side. Finally based on observation they would have been impatient with the consumer device profit margins. Nah, unless the tiger could have changed it's stripes, they could not have changed the outcome.
"Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." "I hear and I forget. I see and I rem
Flame me if you like, but I've seen more BSOD's in the last 6 months on XP than I have on my Linux box in 2 or 3 years.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
I haven't seen a BSOD in years in either XP or Linux. Have you considered that you may suck at life?*
*No, I didn't actually mean that.
Hm, brown iPods anyone?
Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.
Before USB, I had a handheld computer. It required MS Active Sync. That by itself was not a problem. The problem was the software remained active looking for the device to connect. This was a major problem for everything else I have that uses a RS-232 port. The solution was to abandon Active Sync and let the handheld be it's own island so I could have my serial ports back.
After USB, Flash drives worked quite well and would work on Mac, PC, and Linux. MS desicded to play a do it our way game which crippled some flash players. Some manufactures kept the devices open so they would attach and transfer as a flash drive. Some went so far as to play music transfered in this way and allowed copying to and from the device. This was not in Microsoft's best interest as they wanted full DRM handshake and a one way transfer. You can delete songs off the device, but copying from it is prohibited. This needing someting other than drag and drop, means a special application which may mean Windows only which is a problem in addition to any other USB port driver issues and corrupt handshakes and keys.
Drag and drop worked. Flash player manufactures know that. Making a player that has to change mode to handle connections for Plays for Sure simply added a level of complexity to the device. MS tried arm twisting to drop the complexity of 2 modes of operation. In doing so, it broke compatiblility with everything else. For an example of broken drag and drop, try a Creative Zen. You can set aside space for drag and drop, but it won't play any files there, including non-DRM MP3's.
I bought a Coby flash player. They work fine in drag and drop mode. It will record off the mic or radio and save it as MP3's. I can drag the MP3's off the player. For Coby to have these fine features, they simply dropped support for DRM WMA Plays for Sure content. The player will play MP3's and non-DRM WMA files. The best part is I can save files to it from home on Windows PC's, Linux PC's and at work. It doesn't delete everyting to sync to a new PC unlike Plays for Sure, Zune, or FairPlay crippled things.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm sorry, but this is going a little far. All this article says is that MS was trying to develop an mp3 player and that at one point they considered Apple as a partner. Apple would never have signed on for this. In case you haven't noticed, Steve Jobs is just a little bit interested in making the iTunes delivery chain the method for obtaining media content. Do you think that Apple couldn't put out a slick media center wrapped around the Mac Mini or something if they thought it was in their best interest (I mean a real media center with time-shifting TV content, etc., not just streaming a la iTV)? Or that the iPod couldn't support WMA/WMV?
And what would Microsoft have brought to the table anyways? I think it's pretty obvious from the Zune (and most of the other products that MS puts out) that they just don't have the creativity to come up with something as simple and elegant as the iPod, nor do they have the other skills necessary to pull it off. While MS is much, much, much larger (and could have poured tons of cash into it), it's not like Apple was so strapped for funds that they couldn't fund the development.
Now I'm not saying the iPod is perfect or anything, but considering the competition 5 years after launch (and the money that MS has poured into alternatives), it's hard to make a case that Apple could have done much better for themselves (although obviously there are features some of us consumers would like to see added).
I've had five BSOD's on XP. Ever. All were in 2002. Three were because Age of Empires II didn't like something about my laptop's video driver. The other two were turned out to be because my hard drive was doing a gradual swan dive towards complete failure. Since 2002? Zero BSOD's. A few months ago, I discussed this with several office mates and we all agreed that Microsoft had basically fixed BSOD's in XP.
Come to think of it, all of the kernel panics I've seen over the past five years have also been due to bad hardware or me misconfiguring something...
So, why do you think you get so many BSOD's on XP? Do you use bleeding edge hardware? Or incredibly cheap hardware?
Ross
IT'S means IT IS.
Use ITS if you mean to be possessive. (His Hers Its)
I admit it, I've got 'read rage'...
M$-iPod prototype before releasing the Zune.
Just ask YouTube.
No WAY would such a partnership work! One of the companies is creative and well run. The other isn't.
Besides, I can't see S.J. signing up to that one.
Don't make me laugh. I dont know anyone who doesnt have a few complaints about that steaming pile. Including my younger sisters and any non-techies I know. They all have frustrations with it.
??? source? surely you're not referring to the small settlement made a little less than 10 years ago...
What does the majority of the market want? Observing my fellow college students, they want a shiny, nice to hold DAP that does just one thing: play music.
That and they want it to be easy. They want it to plug into their computer, get exactly what the user wants from the user's well organized collection and then play it randomly, all without fuss. M$, because it's more concerned with DRM and marketshare, does not get it right either. The things they do to thwart free software and lockdown content make life hard. That and crappy software to start.
M$'s real problem with iPod is how to unseat them with a cheap competitor without encouraging free software use. That's why cheap players don't do ogg and they promote the inferior MTP over UMS. Between that and DRM demands, they can't win. What they have ended up with is Zune, with it's distinguishing characteristic being crippled wireless.
The hardware to make things easy exists and is cheap. They work just fine under Amarok and would be cheaper and eaiser still if it were not from all the anti-competitive activity of a few nasty companies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft had the chance to chash in. So why didn't they? Because - did they really think they could do better; in this age where industry-by-industry, segment-by-segment, product-by-product... they're being out-manoeuvred? Come on. It's about FREAKING TIME! (And who said politically-correct was wrong?!?) :P
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL89GmwWj-M
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
'cause Hell would've frozen over and counteracted it.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Interesting assertion considering your website is full of fables.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
In order for microsoft to help keep the courts away from breaking them up they need competition. Apple provides that competition. Unfortunately, their computer sales can't keep them afloat forever, so they have the ipod. But the ipod with itunes is a monopoly and if that hits the courts, apple will probably die as a company. So microsoft released competition to the ipod/itunes monopoly. This will help protect Apple in the music business which keeps Apple alive and microsoft's computer competition going.
It's revealed that the manager of Vista calls it a pig, and would buy a Mac if he had a choice.
It's also revealed that the company has been violating the terms of the court order stemming from their conviction for breaking federal law.
The result (according to TFA):"Shares of Microsoft rose 11 cents to $31.11 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They have risen 4.2 percent this month."
This must be what is known as "being able to do no wrong".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just probably anybody that goes into any cooperation with Microsoft gets kicked in the ass by MS later.
Speaking of multimedia/DRM systems MS once had a program called "PlaysForSure". It was targeted towards hardware manufacturers which produce media players and ones that sell media via Internet. It offered these parties an option to cooperate under MS PlaysForSure umbrella - so hardware manufacturers that produce media players would design their hardware to these "specs", media selling companies would design their services to operate with the devices - all of course using and licensing MS technology called Windows Media. Well looks good - no.
After MS released their Zune it happened that their device does not "PlaysForSure" and cannot connect to other services.
How MSish.
I cannot think of a company that ever succeded in partnering MS. Well maybe exept Intel and Citrix.
your != you're
And English is not even my first lang.
had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices
how hard is it? there are 4-6 OSS that do for the ipod, and they had to do it the hard way (reverse engineering) one of which uses perl!
You can fix that in XP by opening System Properties, Advanced tab and clicking the Startup and Recovery button. Uncheck the Automatically Restart checkbox and you'll have your old familiar bluescreens back.
I'm not sure how to enable them in Linux. Probably another reason it's not ready for the desktop yet.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I hate "mp3's" "DVD's" "CD's" and their ilk.
Who's with me?
Which was Jobs's point all along.
Creative had an ok product, licensed with M$ to be able to play DRM-protected WMP files...only M$ didn't succeed as well as they wanted to get online downloads to use WMP.
What Apple had was not just one great product, but 3, which when combined won the day.
They had an mp3 player that was aesthetically impressive, had new inventions for user simplicity (like the volume/menu wheel, which though faulty at first, got better), and easily licensed for 3rd party accessories so you didn't feel like the only way to use it was through the normal headphones.
They had iTunes the desktop software, with its slick look (though why they insisted on the mac look on a windows box i'll never know, but it seemed to work), a look so impressive that it made the users want to use that as their playback software even without the iPod. Windows Media Player kept changing its look, and kept bumping into wars of codecs and DRM license issues that users simply didn't want to deal with. When prompted to auto-upgrade WMP to a new version, users panic because history with Microsoft software shows that such upgrades often break backwards compatibility or at the very least completely lose all of their existing settings. If upgrading WMP suddenly means you can't watch movies you already have or listen to music you already have, then you won't do it, and upgrades did that with WMP and Real Player a LOT.
Creative's tool was ok for loading stuff onto the box, but it wasn't "right" for actually playing the tunes as the desktop player, so the integration factor wasn't there the way it was with iTunes/iPod.
Finally, they successfully got iTunes the store to work (sounds like Spaceballs: the t-Shirt). One stop shopping, fully integrated into the player. Buy the song, put it into a desktop playlist, sync to the iPod, BAM, new music for 99 cents and i never had to change software anywhere.
Such integration is difficult, but Apple did it where Microsoft never could with their partner relationships as they licensed them at the time.
Hence the Zume. They now know the only way to play on Apple's field is to do that same integration - player, desktop software as load tool and preferred player, and music store all in one.
But they'll never get it...or at least not until the "version 3" that it takes Microsoft to have a success for any product launch.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
And Steve asked him to fuck off
-S
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Via Googling, I found the full email via http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/ at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/libra ry/PX08636.pdf.
He was complaining about how bad the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra was vs. the iPod back then. To be fair, I'm pretty sure an iTunes install makes you reboot too. I'm guessing he was just pointing that out that in theory, out of the box, if you use WMP, you shouldn't need a reboot.
I totally agree. I didn't "get" was the big deal was about the iPod until I actually owned one (got it for free via TiVo rewards program). I just used to think it was another MP3 player w/a nice industrial design. When the 1st gen iPod came out and was Mac only, I was amazed by its small size (at the time) for hard drive based player but was turned off by it being Mac only and its high price.
I've owned other MP3 players (Diamond Rio PMP300, PMP500 and Creative Nomad II) and in comparison, the whole experience of those was TERRIBLE. The sync/transfer software sucked, the transfers were slow (only USB 1.1 or parallel back then), I had to use other software to rip to MP3 to rip to WAV and then convert to MP3, there was no notable music stores, etc.
In comparison, iTunes to rip CD just works and gets all its metadata via Gracenote CDDB. Just put in a CD and click Import. iTMS has a pretty good selection and the buying experience is painless. The previews come up quick and they make it so easy to find other music you might like via user submitted iMixes, "listeners also bought" and their music charts. The syncing experience is easy and pretty quick and I like iTunes' podcast support.
I've had two blue screens since last april. The same thing caused both (faulty drivers+opening up multiple game clients+dual monitors of different resolutions I assume).
The only other time I've ever had BSOD problems (like more then 2 a year) with XP was after I purposely loaded a bunch of malware on a box.
Perhaps adware/spyware/malware could be your problem.
For the record I've Crashed SuSE (9.3) more in 2 weeks then I have crashed windows in 2 years and I have 4 boxes running xp in my house (3 of which are on 24/7). Then again I have a FreeBSD box I configured to be the gateway for my house which I set up once and have ignored for the past year or so, but a computer you don't touch isnt very likly to crash.
The IRS (government) is also a "mob" as you put it.
5 3967404913
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-31713332
Can you show me the LAW that makes me liable to pay income tax?
If you want to show me up as an idiot then show me the law instead of flaming. Thanks
(Disclaimer: I'm not American, I'm from Europe)
I probably am missing something here concerning the American cell phone system, but couldn't they just sell it unlocked? Then you'd use whatever privider and whatever subscription you prefer.
My original guess was that they didn't do it because the iPhone would simply cost way too much without a two-year contract. I was mentally adding up numbers when I read the specs, and I expectet the iPhone to cost twice as much as it did, so I'm guessing it's heavily subsidized due to the two-year contract you agree to. So, is there anything preventing Apple from releasing it unlocked in the US?
That was non voting stock they purchaced way back in the day to help Apple get back on thier feet for theft of intelectiual property ... also MS no longer has any of that stock ... Sheesh I'm tired of explining this every time I see a misinformed comment relating to MS ever controling Apple.
I'd mod you up if I could.
It's not even that these people are their target audience. Sometimes I think their target audience is only Jobs. I think they don't do focus groups and all that stuff other companies do to figure out what people want.
I think for Jobs, taste is really what's one of the driving points. There's this youtube video where Jobs talks about taste, and it sounds incredibly elitist and snobbish, but when you think about it, it's just true. Apple's products have taste. They care about the details, the fit and finish. They aren't perfect, but they pretty damn well try, and when they're done, they improve upon it, and improve again.
Just look at the Dock. Apple put a lot of work into making the Dock look good, into making the icons scale smoothly. Applications which need your attention "jump" up and down. Windows "slide" into the dock if minimized, and so on. Microsoft, on the other hand, just put whatever came to mind into the start bar. Show all windows! No room? Show all apps! We need some icons for drivers! Put them on the right! Quickstart icons? On the left! And some kind of menu! Let's just call it "Start," even though that makes no sense! Now let's ad some speech balloons! And some context menus! But some icons show the menu when clicked! Anod others open apps when clicked! And even others just display stuff! And let's make the whole thing green and blue!
There's a real difference here.
If the earth was flat...blah..blah
IN other news...
If Slashdot has some real journalists.... blah blah
I've got a couple of Nomad IIc's which I use for myself (the ipod's my wife's ;) ), and yeah, the tool sucks. In 1.1 it's dreadfully slow, in 2.0 (IIc supports it), the whole interface freezes while the transfers are going on - bad threading code in there. For myself, I now use an mp3-cdrom compatible sony walkman, with an mp3-cdrom player in my car as well that can share the discs. The only hassle there is that *some* of my artists when compiled together end up with 715 meg, meaning i have to cut a song or two out. grrr.
iTMS is good for those who will buy the stuff they carry. my particular genres are such that either they don't have it (most progressive rock and good local celtic stuff), or the sound quality is too critical to buy compressed files (classical), or i prefer to by direct from the artist and cut out the middleman (back to the celtic).
I was thinking of finally giving in and going to iTunes to collect some missing 80s pop-rock songs that I'd like playing for a party, only Tower went away and I just got a ton of 80s best-of cds there and rock-cheap prices!
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Remember once upon a time even Mac fans such as myself wondered what a better world it might be if Apple had won its suit against Microsoft? This is relevant to the topic at hand because here are the analysts again wondering what a wonderful world it might be if Apple and Microsoft held hands and sang Kumbaya.
... ESPECIALLY core mac fans whose expectations of Apple have never been higher as evidenced by the post-announcement iPhone backlash.
Well, I've come to the conclusion that we were wrong. I have to take a step back though, to the time when analysts kept arguing that licensing Mac OS to run on other machines was the way to go. The analysts never understood, as Steve Jobs did, that Apple is not a software company. That where Microsoft believes that the profits are in the software, that only works if your goal is to be the Wal-Mart of the computer industry... brand dominance by quantity, not quality.
We saw what happened when Apple licensed out its OS... it was a total disaster. Apple's strength was not the OS alone. They have always been a hardware company that made an operating system only because it allowed them to manage every level of the user experience in one integrated package. No other PC manufacturers have this advantage, and must instead rely on only the hope that a third party OS manages to work just well enough with zillions of third party apps and drivers so that consumers aren't driven away. Well, they're being driven away now... and they're going to Apple. Maybe not in a flood, but one by one they're popping up at Apple's doorstep because the iPod has shown them what a tightly integrated hardware and OS can do -- when it's done right, anyway.
But could it have been done right if Apple won the suit? I don't think so. By the time it would have happened, Steve Jobs was out of the picture, and Jonathan Ive hadn't yet carved a place as Apple's product design genius. At the time of the 9th Circuit's decision, Spindler was CEO. There's every likelihood that then-bloated and corporatized Apple would have gained some market dominance but would have played it just as complacently as Microsoft has.
The fact is, the underdog position Apple has held has been very good for pushing them to require better design than Microsoft and Apple's PC manufacturing competitors like Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc. It's possible the company's premature financial success, at a time when Spindler and Amelio were more concerned with turning out "beige boxes" just like the next guy, would have pre-empted any return by Steve Jobs and Apple would not have emerged as the brand zeitgeist to which all other companies designs aspire. Today, while they do not dominate the market in terms of sheer volume, they dominate the market in brand perception, regarded as the most desirable brand by consumers across all products of all types. They have a reputation for quality that PC manufacturers do not. They have a following that PC manufacturers do not. So strong is this following that Apple was forced to announce its iPhone before FCC filings because there's a voracious appetite for Apple rumors. Can anyone imagine throngs of consumers digging through FCC filings to be the first to announce what Motorola's next new whiz-bang product is going to be?
So, would a partnership with Microsoft be good for Apple or Microsoft? No. Not only would it risk Apple's name being dragged in the mud by inferior multimedia standards managed by a company that doesn't have half the design aesthetic or QC concerns that Apple NEEDS to have. Microsoft can make a shitty product and sit back and watch people have no choice but to buy it... Apple has to work to impress people
It wouldn't work for Microsoft either. They've had this fanciful notion that they can make people love their feeble attempts at multimedia domination simply by latching on to Apple's superior product. Where's the benefit for Apple? We already tackled that one. Ok, what happens to both Apple AND Microsoft when customers see
Agreed! I'm not an M$ apologist* - but XP has been remarkably stable. My team supports 15,000 Windows XP workstations and frankly, we very rarely see BSOD problems (5 per year). When we do it's almost always either dying hardware or a poorly-written 3rd-party driver installed by a user.** I think it's only fair to give M$ credit where it's due - they have improved Windows stability dramatically from the NT days. * I own only Macs (PowerBook G4, Intel Mini) and use a MacPro at work (with W2K, XP, Vista and Linux on Parallels). ** For political reasons we have to give many users local admin rights. It makes my job sooo much harder.
Maybe this partnership would have "changed everything," but definitely for the worse. It's endlessly annoying that some putative interest MS might have had in partnering with Apple is automatically seen by the business press as the salvation or transformation of the project. There's only two contributions MS could have made: show Apple some secrets in installing iTunes + Quicktime on the Windows desktop so that it wouldn't be as buggy as it often is, and standing with Apple to fight the idea of DRMed music. In return, the iPod certainly could have supported wma, and there could have been some coordination between Quicktime and the Windows Media Player so that either might have fed the iPod, and the two media players could have played each other's stuff.
But this is cloudcuckooland. This isn't how Microsoft has ever worked. They make it as difficult as possible to play nice with them. They learn whatever they can from temporary alliances, then they either buy you out or crush you with what they learned. But of course, they didn't learn it from YOU, no.
When windows becomes an open-source project, that's when I'll trust them. Or five years later, after the open-source community has had the chance to pick over their code.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY
What a poorly written article. Did this asshat even bother to read the pdf with the emails these quotes were taken from?
In an email chain to a couple of MS employees, expressing his dissatisfaction with a Creative Zen player, he tried out, Jim Allchin said: i think I should talk with Jobs. Right now, I think I should open up a dialog l~or support of the iPOD. Unless something changes, the iPOD will drive people away from WMP.
This is a far cry from Microsoft as a corporation actually considering a partnership. There's a much better article here, with a link to the actual emails (PDF). That Bloomberg article is a pile of shit.
I was quoting history for crying out loud. I did not insult the parent poster or make any inflammatory statements.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That's just not true, and a cursory check at the NASDAQ site reveals he's not even in the top 100 (I stopped looking).
That troll was getting old five years ago, and then it died of natural causes. Let it stay dead.
The parent is clearly not a troll, and being modded as such is just plain wrong.
Although I think the iPod has been great in terms of user experience and form factor (especially the Nano) I think Apple's proprietary... well... everything really - would be bad for the market overall. I think Napster in particular with their subscription model all-you-can-eat plan is helping drive things forward, which we probably would never have seen if Apple controlled all the strings. Apple still has Lost exclusively (and no HD version) as well as other shut-out deals they've made like the Harry Potter books. I love their products, but I don't really care for their pricing and DRM strategies. Microsoft almost always does their best work when they're the underdog (XBox 360, Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones) and they're certainly most agressive on new features when they're not the market leader, so MS will probably drive the overall digital audio market much more agressively when they're not teamed with Apple (and vice-versa). The other good thing about MS being a competitor to Apple is that they are very good about letting other companies have a chance of competing against Apple without completely ignoring the DRM issues. Sure there would be MP3 players out there, but there would be little-to-none legal digital audio outside of Apple if Microsoft didn't enable all the other smaller hardware manufacturers to group together behind a single DRM standard. I will say I'm still scratching my head on the Zune, though. I don't understand why it doesn't do WiFi OTA purchasing from day 1. That's the next logical step for the market and it's the one area where MS could have really been the leader. It also would have forced Apple's hand on addressing the OTA issue which would be great for consumers. Viva le competition!