Google To Take On iTunes?

An anonymous reader writes 'Multiple sources say Google is preparing to launch Google Audio. According to people familiar with the matter, Google has been securing content from record companies. Is Google about to go head-to-head with Apple's iTunes?'

Comments

Google did a few years ago...

[iCantSpell]

... It's called songbird http://www.getsongbird.com/ = (mozilla+google)

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Are you sure? Unless I have missed something, I think songbird has nothing to with google at all, and the only Mozilla connection was xulrunner platform.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[ajdlinux]

I think they're talking about iTMS here, not just the iTunes player.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[SanityInAnarchy]

And even if it was, they also contributed to Firefox, until they decided to start over with Chrome.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[ozmanjusri]

they're talking about iTMS here, not just the iTunes player.

Yep, it's about a music store.

It makes sense for Google to have a content store for their Android phones, and it's clear Apple doesn't want to play nice with competitors (Palm Pre, anyone?). I just hope Google do it so well that they frighten Apple into dropping prices and restrictions.

It's a market that's begging for a little real competition.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

Songbird doesn't even have global hotkeys for mac or linux yet.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Saint Fnordius]

Prices may drop, but Apple's philosophy from the beginning was "the store is here for iPod owners, since the other stores were all Microsoft's bitches and we won't pay for a WMA DRM license". In other words, Apple is still very much tied to the hardware, and isn't likely to give it up soon.

On the one hand, the iTunes Store turns a modest income, but it's peanuts compared to the income that the computers, iPods and iPhones generate. Apple might actually be happy to have the iTunes Store become irrelevant if it means people buy more iPods.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Paml refusing to follow the USB standard have to do with Apple playing nice with competitors?

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[dave420]

Apple could not bother to check whether the device presenting itself to iTunes as a compatible device really is an Apple device, and then work with the device. They wouldn't have to offer support, and it's not exactly difficult to work as an iPod - the file formats are no mystery. Instead they get a bunch of sand in their vaginas and start complaining.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Tarsir]

I'm sure they would, but I can't imagine a scenario where the iTunes Store's irrelevancy could possibly drive more iPod sales.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

iTMS isn't just music, it's also music videos, tv, movies, lps, oh, and that app store thing. There may not be much income in and of itself, but it's a key piece of the iPhone/iPod experience and outsourcing it would be tucker max stupid.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[chaim79]

It makes sense for Google to have a content store for their Android phones, and it's clear Apple doesn't want to play nice with competitors (Palm Pre, anyone?). I just hope Google do it so well that they frighten Apple into dropping prices and restrictions.

Apple doesn't play nice with people who try to hack the iTunes sync, however, if Palm had an ounce of intelligence they would have used the Public API's for accessing iTunes content like everyone else does.

Also, the Music cartels are the ones fighting for the price points on the music in iTunes, Jobs wanted it all at $.99 but agreed to go variable pricing in order to get concessions on removing DRM.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[MBGMorden]

You're right. I know that personally I bought my iPod BECAUSE of iTunes. No other digital audio players worked with iTunes, and the WMA-encrypted stuff was a royal PITA to use. The store and easy syncing were a huge boon, but being tied to that app, well, sucks. For a while I quit using it and went strictly Amazon, but I started using iTunes again when they went to unencrypted AAC files. I still have some encrypted tracks left over from the start though.

Google is in a different position though. They don't really sell much hardware (SOME - ie the Google Appliance, but that's not their main market). They primarily deal in soft-goods. If they launch such a store then I'd bet they'll be willing to make it work with just about anybody who wants to work with it, not just Android phone owners.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Indeed. On windows iTunes presents a COM interface that allows complete access to the library contents, including adding and removing your own elements. The only thing I can think of is that Palm was lazy and didn't want to have to handle synchronizing themselves. Lazy bums.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[int69h]

Apple plays nice w/ competitors, it's just that Palm chose to literally lie rather than use the published APIs.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[VGPowerlord]

"since the other stores were all Microsoft's bitches and we won't pay for a WMA DRM license"

I thought the iTunes Music Stores predated Microsoft's Plays For Sure program.

Wikipedia seems to agree with me, as their iTunes history page states that iTunes Store support was added to iTunes in 2003, while Plays For Sure started in 2004.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Anonymusing]

Apple offers a public SDK to allow other music players to work nicely with iTunes. But Palm wants to hack to emulate an iPod instead of using the nice APIs like everybody else. That's Palm's fault, not Apple's.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Abreu]

If they launch such a store then I'd bet they'll be willing to make it work with just about anybody who wants to work with it, not just Android phone owners.

This is exactly what I am hoping

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[shutdown -p now]

Apple's fault is providing an SDK that doesn't let players do everything that an iPod can do.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[BitZtream]

Plays4Sure was at least the 3rd DRM scheme Microsoft came up with, not the first. Plays4Sure was what MS claimed was going to be the consistent way to DRM, unifying the different ways they had done it in the past so everyone would play nicely together for DRM'd WMAs from then on ...

Of course that ended when the Zune came out and MS didn't even bother to use Plays4Sure for themselves.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[hazydave]

Profits on the iTunes store are decent (iTunes store revenue was $1.018 billion in Apple's fourth quarter.. this also includes licensing fees for iPod/iPhone accessories from third parties, they don't break it down any more), but also irrelevant. The existence of the tightly coupled iTunes store and iTunes player drives the sales of the very, very, very successful iPhone ($2.3 billion in the fourth quarter) and somewhat less successful, these days, iPod (apparently, people are buying iPhones instead... only 10.2 million iPhones sold that quarter, versus nearly 7.4 way more profitable iPhones).

Apple won the MP3 player market by delivering content, back when no one else had brokered any reasonable deal to do similarly with their player. Most still haven't done as well, though with DRM dead (for music, anyway), this matters much less than it once did. But take away the iTunes store, and then Apple's competing on a very even basis with everyone else. Sales would suffer, soon enough.

To really be successful against Apple, this kind of online point-of-sales won't hurt at all... there are plenty of users who can figure out other ways to download, sync, and install apps or music, but enough who can't, or simply don't want to be bothered.

Now, invent the mechanism, but make it non-exclusive, and you really have something. If I can shop for Android apps (and other stuff, like music and video.. might as well, once I'm there, eh) at the Google Store, the Verizon Store, the Amazon Store... well, then we've fixed one of the fundamental problems with Apple's model -- no competition. As a computer savvy person, I know I can get music from Amazon or a CD just as easily as from the iTunes store, but you need some knowledge for that.. most users take the easy way out. So Apple doesn't really have to compete with Amazon on prices for music. And it's way more complex for video or apps. Thus, no incentive to lower prices... they have a captive market. There's a big potential in retaining that ease of use, but also adding the market competition inherent in non-virtual consumer products.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Reverberant]

What doesn't it allow other players to do (other than pretend to be iPods)? Nokia Multimedia Transfer works just fine with iTunes - in fact better, since iTunes doesn't have to be running for my E71 to sync with iTunes content.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[modmans2ndcoming]

Because the Zune ecosystem is completely supplanting all Windows Media going forward.

Finally... MS is vertically integrating its products.

WMC, XBox 360, WinMo, Windows OS will all be running Zune software and in the case of WinMo... the Zune UI. With this kind of integration and the Zune pass, if they can expand ZunePass to include all you can eat TV and integrate that UI into WMC, they can take on cable and offer infinitely more flexibility.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[theurge14]

Peanuts? The ITMS is the largest music retailer on the planet. I'm sure that's making somebody some money.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[Vastad]

If they launch such a store then I'd bet they'll be willing to make it work with just about anybody who wants to work with it, not just Android phone owners.

This is exactly what I am hoping

Not just that. I am personally really hoping that Google approach their music store the same way as their Android OS.

In the sense that Google will figure out how to take care of the back-end/server-side/licensing/content delivery and still provide an SDK and some libraries for the front-end/GUI for anybody to tinker with, not just lock it down to SongBird or some Google exclusive client. I despise the iTunes UI and I especially loathe the way it organises your music library.

I'll bet you good money if this is the way it goes, within 3 - 6 months you'll have 3 to 4 choices of "gTunes" clients that will totally change the way we manage our music across platforms and devices. Just imagine what happens when it expands into films and TV series just like iTunes already does? Every Android OS phone will be a portable media center that can sync, purchase and communicate through your gmail account.

Re:Google did a few years ago...

[bandmassa]

I would have thought Google were perfectly placed to provide a means for unsigned artists to sell there stuff directly, but instead they're going with label artists. Everybody wants their cut of the slave trade music industry, nobody really wants to get behind actual music.

What about the player?

[scottblascocomposer]

I'd be thrilled if Google could do a music player analogue of Picasa. I've always hated iPhoto, and Picasa is great. A similar product to displace iTunes would be incredibly welcome (and yes, I've tried Songbird; maybe someday, but it's not there yet).

Re:What about the player?

[E IS mC(Square)]

I absolutely love Picasa. But I am not sure here we are talking about just a desktop application. I just hope Google buys Media Monkey (one of the very few proprietary s/w I use - even in its free version, its fantastic) and get done with the desktop application part.

What is more important is the supplier aspect of this. What labels will it be? What and how much of Indie stuff? What all formats? Will it be better than Amazon in terms of content and delivery?

Re:What about the player?

[rolfwind]

Really? I thought both were inferior to digikam. Digikam seems more built around sorting pics while iPhoto/picas seemed to be built around the camera roll theme,where pics were taken together and near the same time. I admit my experience with them isn't vast and it has been a while.

Google players will obviously be the android based phones. And the record companies have been hoping for a while to break the dominance of iTunes so they can pit distributors against each other and gain the upper hand in that dynamic again. Either way it doesn't matter as artists will eventally be able to deal with the marketplaces directly rather than through an expensive middle man once physical media is completely out.

Re:What about the player?

[slifox]

Music Player Daemon (mpd) has the right idea: separate the playing backend and the user interface. The result is an easily-interfaceable (many, many clients for all platforms, web, etc) and reliable player that rarely (never for me) crashes, and will continue to play even if X dies (which makes repairing X a little more enjoyable).

My favorite client is QMPDClient, which is cross-platform and has a good user interface for easily switching between the Library view (3-section Artist/Album/Songs), the Directories view (which shows the Music directory as a folder tree), and the Playlist view (for saving or loading playlists). The directory view is the big selling point for me, because I have my music folder well organized by genre, artist, album, but not necessarily well organized as far as ID3 tags go.

Here's a screenshot: http://dump.bitcheese.net/images/batidij/qmpdclient-win32.png

It's definitely worth a try...

MPD: http://mpd.wikia.com/
QMPDClient: http://bitcheese.net/wiki/QMPDClient
Other MPD Clients: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

Re:What about the player?

[jeffstar]

an alternative to itunes would be great, but it would have to sync non jailbroken iphones ipod touch / whatever comes next and apple clearly doesn't want any program other than itunes doing that. see palm.

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also UberView is a great little piece of software that was/is a win32 app but he is now developing a cross-platform version. Nix version can act a mpd frontend. It is focused around the album covers, is small and fast and does not rely on tags in any way.

The Nix version is mentioned at the Arch forums [url]http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=61660[/url].
Latest source is here [url]http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22508[/url]

Re:What about the player?

[onefriedrice]

an alternative to itunes would be great, but it would have to sync non jailbroken iphones ipod touch / whatever comes next and apple clearly doesn't want any program other than itunes doing that. see palm.

Huh? I assume you're trying to reference Palm's Pre, but that whole debacle doesn't have anything to do with Apple devices syncing with non-Apple software.

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackberry does fine syncing with iTunes. "See Palm" is a case study in asshattery. If Palm had used the iTunes sync APIs, or even if it just parsed the iTunes library XML, they'd be able sync without issue. Palm did it out of sloth, for publicity, and to get people like you to make comments like yours.

Ignorance and random Apple-bashing. How original.

Re:What about the player?

[EvilIdler]

"see palm"?! Palm tried to use iTunes to sync with THEIR devices. Not make a program of their own to sync with iPods.

I'd welcome an alternative to iTunes, especially if it had the selection of iTunes, the prices of eMusic and the convenience of Amarok. They'd be better off just plugging into Amarok, really. Also strike a deal with eMusic, while they're at it. Albums are technically $6 apiece, which is better than iTunes.

Re:What about the player?

[Weezul]

You just made my day! mpd looks awesome. Thank you :)

Re:What about the player?

[LordAndrewSama]

I just visited mpd.wikia.org in opera and it redirected to some zroalert.com site "Initializing virus scanner" with a little alert saying my computer was at high risk and should be scanned thoroughly. I disabled scripts and quickly closed the tab, then visited again in firefox with adblock plus and it's fine, no redirects. some malicious advertising there, maybe? anyways, just warning people.

Also, googling zroalert.com didn't find anything much, except that the domain had been registered...

Re:What about the player?

[N1AK]

Picasa is one of the few pieces of software that impresses me, and continues to impress me more with each revision. From the way it imports and sorts, through the quality of its automated colour/light fixing to features like face recognition, online gallery integration and tagging it makes organising 'home' photos a pleasent experience rather than a task.

Maybe better software exists, and it probably isn't as useful to serious photographers but everyone I've shown it to from Grandparents to early teens have become loyal users.

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks fine for me in Opera (Windows).

Re:What about the player?

[ChienAndalu]

For Gnome users, Sonata should be mentioned.

Re:What about the player?

[Muggy7]

Picasa needs a decent Raw processing engine and non-destructive Raw editing to enable it to really take on some of the 'pro' packages such as Adobe Lightroom. Wasn't really good enough in this regard last time I played with it - though that was some time ago and it may have improved.

Re:What about the player?

[Fred_A]

I absolutely love Picasa. But I am not sure here we are talking about just a desktop application. I just hope Google buys Media Monkey (one of the very few proprietary s/w I use - even in its free version, its fantastic) and get done with the desktop application part.

I'd never heard of MediaMonkey but the fact that the download is a .exe file suggests that it's limited to a single platform.

Re:What about the player?

[E IS mC(Square)]

Unfortunately, yes. And that's a pity. As much as I like Amarok on my Ubuntu, sometimes, I just wish MM was available.

Re:What about the player?

[RiotingPacifist]

What features of iTunes do you like? If its shitty program that installs network demons just to play your media then perhaps you should get your head checked there is:
amarok (1.4 was a very good playlist based player, 2.x is getting there)
rhythmbox (gnome based)
mpd based players (work on windows)
I suppose windows options are limited as WMP/winamp/foobar are different kinds of players, but there must be something other than songbird

If its the iPod/Phone syncing related features, then i dont think anything but iTunes will ever compete
If its the music store integration then TFA is too sparse on details to tell. Assuming that google audio 1) exists (i mean this is techcrunch), 2) is a music download service, then hopefully they will collaborate with all mediaplayers to add support like mangatunes in amarok. For bonus points they should allow redownloads (within reason) and let you choose the format (some of us really do prefer ogg, hell somebody must be insane enough to like wma)

Re:What about the player?

[TheCycoONE]

Digicam is impressive, but overwhelming for a casual user compared with F-Spot, iPhoto, Picasa, and Adobe Photoshop Album SE (imho)

Re:What about the player?

[Alpha830RulZ]

I don't know about GP's preferences, but what -I- like about iTunes is that it is the one application that my wife and kids never ask me for help with. That says something significant about the user design.

Re:What about the player?

[spamking]

Media Monkey is awesome. It has several features that come in very handy for music nerds.

You can:

Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.

Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata. (This seems to work very well).

Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.

Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.

Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume.

Record CDs and convert MP3s, M4A, OGG, FLAC and WMA files etc. into other formats.

Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.

Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Re:What about the player?

[randomsearch]

I completely agree with the comments on Picasa.

I'd like to add that Linux users can run Picasa under Wine and it works perfectly (in my experience). It's also provided completely pre-packaged and installed like a charm on Ubuntu. The only downside is that some of the fonts don't look as nice as native applications. It's much, much faster than equivalent GNOME applications such as f-spot, is more robust and scales better.

RS

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, foobar2000 did that backend/frontend thing ages ago, not to mention it looks a lot better and is customizable like hell. http://www.foobar2000.org/

Re:What about the player?

[RiotingPacifist]

I have never had a friend/family member ask how to use amarok more than once (which I think is fair enough as I needed to be told how to use iTunes the first time). Amarok's ui (back in 1.4 and once I set up my 2.x), is 2 frames you drag music from your collection to the playlist, it's easier IMO than iTunes (which is pretty much cloned by songbird and rhythmbox (you lose the iTunes store but gain not running network deamons just to listen to your music))

Re:What about the player?

[debatem1]

That's weird- back when people didn't know better than to ask me to help them with it I had to wrestle with it all the time. Cultural difference, maybe?

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 I love mpd.

Re:What about the player?

[johny42]

Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.

What a cool feature! My player only manages rock music.

Re:What about the player?

[shutdown -p now]

Maybe better software exists, and it probably isn't as useful to serious photographers but everyone I've shown it to from Grandparents to early teens have become loyal users.

One reason for that, I believe, is because Picasa UI simply makes sense. The first time I started using it, I didn't have any problem finding all functions that I needed, and, no less important, everything was convenient and the workflow was fast.

I haven't seen any other app in this niche that could boast of the same.

Re:What about the player?

[BrentH]

How do I run MPD on windows?

Re:What about the player?

[jeffstar]

right. guess i didn't rtfdebacle well enough.

Although no program that I know of other than itunes can be used to put songs on my itouch and apple is working their hardest to keep it that way.

Re:What about the player?

[fast turtle]

Well as a business owner, I can not allow Picassa to be installed on any of the computers due to potential security flaws. The biggest issue I have with Picassa is the fact that it needs to install with Admin Privelages and that it indexes all files on the system that as an Admin privelaged app, it can. Sorry but the only files Picassa should be indexing are the shared/public pictures and the individual my picture folders. There is absolutely no reason it needs to index My Documents even if there are images placed in that locations. In fact, now that I'm running Win7, I'm reevaluating the installation of Google Desktop Search as it's simply duplicating the Windows Search functionality that I hate to say is actually better then Google in regards to my usage/need patterns.

An example of the difference in effectiveness is the fact that I have a document archive in excess of 300K files. Using a single search term, Google only located 50K+ files with the term in them, while Windows located all 150K+ files that had the term in them. This included the many plain text files scattered throughout various folders where the term was used in discussion or referenced. When Google only finds 1/3 of the files using a single term, I have to wonder if it is worth keeping it around due to potential security holes and the possibility of inadvertentyly sharing data with Google that is required to be kept private under Federal Rules and Regs.

Re:What about the player?

[WiiVault]

While I love Picasa as well I don't get why an obvious troll would get a +5 mod. What about iPhoto is particularly terrible?

Re:What about the player?

[WNight]

Yes. This is a perfect example of Apple's asshattery.

The ideal response to someone using undocumented APIs is to let the next change of the API break their software. That would have been fine. That's just part of writing APIs - deciding not to grandfather broken use.

But Apple has to break everything now. Apparently all the time Microsoft pulled this shit really rankled and Steve Jobs has been itching to be the big dog himself.

Re:What about the player?

[WNight]

So? Is it wrong to write software to interface with other software and devices?

By this logic all MS has to do to keep evil hackers (Open Office users) from reading MS-Office documents is stick a 'Software ID' byte in the file and cry that everyone is cheating by using the only value that works (ooops, the MS company ID value, I mean.)

No, it's bullshit. You make it, I buy it, it's legal to rip apart and build something to interface with it.

Re:What about the player?

[norminator]

I love Picasa, but I think it's pretty clear that it's for regular folks who want to get their pictures off of their cameras and post them on Facebook or on their blogs. It's obviously not a professional solution, as it's very much geared towards making things simple. And for that it's great, and I'd recommend it to every non-professional owner of a digital camera.

Re:What about the player?

[Alpha830RulZ]

Or my kids are smarter about computers than your friends are. Or I'm grouchier. :-)

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Picasa is great if you're shooting jpeg, but not RAW.

I'll shoot in manual mode and even though every photo has the same shutter, aperture, WB, and ISO setting Picasa adjusts each image differently, exposure and colour wise. It's a pain in the ass.

Re:What about the player?

[jred]

Apparently you don't.

Re:What about the player?

[Hurricane78]

A similar product to displace iTunes would be incredibly welcome

You mean, like AmaroK? I have seen iTunes on my brother's Mac, and it is pretty similar to AmaroK. But it lacks many features.

Re:What about the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Palm is not using undocumented APIs. They're spoofing. Apple cuts them off because you don't get to impersonate hardware without permission.

Re:iGoons!

[Anonymous Coward]

just like idont? *ducks*

Its a Fractal

[NETHED]

This, if true, will only hasten the divide between the two tech darlings Google and Apple.

Apple has a vested interest in maintaining their defacto monopoly on online music sales though their vertical product pipeline. The Zune is no real threat, as Microsoft does not have the mindshare. Google, with Android, have significant clout, and potentially enough mass to unseat Apple from the head of the online music sales table.

Apple has done very well with the iPhone, but if history is our guide, they did very well with the original Macintosh. Fast-forward a few years to now, and the story is being repeated. Apple is dominant with their iPhone platform, but Steve Jobs is too obsessed with removing buttons from mice to loosen his grip on the brand. This has help Apple survive, but it ultimatly leads to Apple's cyclical demise.

Anyway, Google launching a music app will cause Apple to remove Google maps, and Youtube integration from their products. In the end, Google (openness) will win over the closed Apple system. Yes, the Apple devices will be pretty, but the Google stuff will work well enough, be less expensive, and have 95%+ of market share. (Its like we've seen that before somewhere....)

Re:Its a Fractal

[E IS mC(Square)]

>>... will cause Apple to remove Google maps, and Youtube integration from their products.

You are dreaming. They simply can't - even if they want to.

Re:Its a Fractal

[NETHED]

Why not?

Apple and Steve Jobs historically hate being tied/dependent on anyone else.
iWork is a beautiful example of Jobs wanting to no longer have to deal with Microsoft. On paper, it makes sense, but in the cold hard truth of reality, Pages.app is no where near the sophistication of Word for Mac. But Jobs wants it to be pretty, and functional enough.
Either way, Apple hates being tied to vendors, and I see Google being divorced sooner than later.

Re:Its a Fractal

[SanityInAnarchy]

I think they could, given everything else they've done lately -- though I agree it would probably be devastating for the brand.

Re:Its a Fractal

[mikeken]

I agree, too late to remove something like that, people would be so very mad.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

Macintosh market share is growing. In a recession.

Re:Its a Fractal

[NETHED]

Replying to anonymous: Apple Macintosh was introduced in 1984, at the tail end of the 1980s recession. Apple iPhone released in 2007, in the midst of the current recession. Take that as you will

Re:Its a Fractal

[GaryPatterson]

Apple has done very well with the iPhone, but if history is our guide, they did very well with the original Macintosh.

Not any version of history I've seen. The Mac struggled for a while before finding a niche in desktop publishing, where it languished while PC-compatible machines caught up, overtook it and took over the world. The desktop metaphor took over the computing world, but mostly through Windows.

History is no guide, unless you believe the players have learnt nothing from it.

Steve Jobs is too obsessed with removing buttons from mice

Like many commentators, you've missed the point. He is focused on quality, and the vision he has for Apple seems to include removing anything that detracts from that goal. I can't say if he's 'obsessed' as I don't personally know the man.

Back on topic - competition is great. Now that Apple have pushed back the limits on music purchasing and pushed DRM off the table (aided greatly by Amazon), players like Google can step up and provide a music ecosystem similar to iTunes. Hopefully Google will include new features that draw users towards their product, stimulating Apple to work harder to compete.

I hope Google produce something amazing.

Re:Its a Fractal

[NETHED]

My friend, I whole heartedly agree with you. I'm typing on a Mac, with an iPod touch charging near by, and a iPod nano somewhere in my bag. I agree that Apple products are superior to competitors for a number of reasons. I also agree that competition is needed.


All I wanted to say is that Steve Jobs' singular vision for vertical control of the market is what hurts Apple in the long run. I can't speak with any authority, but I believe that Jobs did NOT want apps to be sold for the iPhone. The way they are controlling the App Store is indicative of that. Whether that is right or wrong is not our business, its Apple's. Its their store, and they can do what ever they damn well please.


But with Android's recent improvements, and long term potential success, Apple is no longer operating within a vacuum.

Re:Its a Fractal

[GoochOwnsYou]

Yes, the Apple devices will be pretty

Maybe its just personal taste but I find the HTC Magic a better looking device than the iPhone.

Re:Its a Fractal

[X0563511]

Either way, Apple hates being tied to vendors,

Which is funny to me, as they seem to have no problem tying people to them.

Re:Its a Fractal

[RickRussellTX]

Apple has a vested interest in maintaining their defacto monopoly on online music sales though their vertical product pipeline.

Are you certifiably insane? They have no such monopoly. You can buy music all over the place, without DRM. I've been buying music on-line for years, and I think the last iTune I purchased was 2005. Heck, Amazon's downloader (native versions for Win, Mac and I think Linux) will download albums and add them to iTunes for you, utterly transparently, and they have since at least 2007, which is long time on the technology clock. In that time I've moved my entire music collection from Win, to Linux, to Mac, back to Win without so much as a blip.

Do they have a de facto monopoly on portable video solutions that actually work? I might give you that, but it's purely de facto. They aren't preventing others from entering the market or abusing market power. It's hardly Apple's fault that nobody else (except Pirate Bay) can do it correctly.

Re:Its a Fractal

[mjwx]

Apple iPhone released in 2007, in the midst of the current recession.

The recession didn't start in 2007, it started in late 2008. For Australia the height hit in feb/mar 2009 and is practically over now.

2007 was when economies were booming.

As for you GP post I agree, it will be Apple's pathological need for control that will be its downfall, it's all happened before. Google is positioning itself to take advantage of Apple's fall, especially since most of Google's ties to Apple have been severed.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Saint Fnordius]

I disagree with you as far as the online music sales monopoly goes: Apple's real interest isn't in dominating the online music store business as much as it is maintaining dominance in the music player business. They want to sell iPods first, and the online store is merely an accessory. So no, I don't think Apple would retaliate by banning Google apps, especially if it could hurt sales of iPhones and iPods in any way. The music store is a valuable chess piece, but one Apple would sacrifice to protect the more important pieces on the board.

I also think Apple is aware that this dominance cannot last forever, but their long-term strategy has always been to find what tech is a great idea if it only had a polished user interface, and give it a UI that makes it suddenly cool. Google's strategy is similar, but slightly different. Google's strategy is all about developing new ways for people to find and use the information that is out there, be it web sites, books, photos or music. The difference between the two companies is that Apple is concerned about the hardware and devices, whereas Google is focussed more on the software.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Itninja]

They have no such monopoly. You can buy music all over the place, without DRM.

Well, you can buy music all over the place. But for the vast, vast majority of online music buyers when they think 'I want to buy a song', they think 'iTunes'. Apple (and other independent research firms) put their online music market share at something like 80%. That's certainly not a monopoly in the legal sense, but it is in the practical sense.

Re:Its a Fractal

[maglor_83]

Maps they could remove and replace with their own version. Youtube they couldn't.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Saint Fnordius]

I think the real reason Apple is so reluctant to allow apps on the iPhone is fear that one malicious app could destroy the ecosystem. That's why they first decided to not allow apps, at least not until they had the store set up.

I personally think Apple needs to have two delivery methods to the iPhone: the app store, where Apple can act as your gatekeeper, and through the developer environment, where you compile from source code and assume all responsibility for whatever bugs are in the software. Thus the only way to distribute outside of the app store would be to give away the source code. (The same thing goes for Android: either trust the app store tied to your phone or compile the code yourself)

Re:Its a Fractal

[trajanus22]

defacto monopoly on online music sales

Really? I get all my online music downloads off of Amazon. Am I the only one?

Re:Its a Fractal

[indiechild]

I hear what you're saying, but I think Steve Jobs' benevolent dictatorship is what has made Apple so successful. If it wasn't for Jobs being a demanding tyrant, Apple products would be mediocre at best. The guy isn't exactly known for being friendly, but I admire his strive for perfection.

Jobs has outstanding business sense. If he realises something isn't working, he'll change his approach. I don't think he's particularly tied down to any particular path. That's something a lot of commentators miss. The iPhone App Store thing is a constantly evolving beast.

But yeah, competition is good. I wish Google and others all the best.

Re:Its a Fractal

[biovoid]

That's certainly not a monopoly in the legal sense, but it is in the practical sense.

No it isn't. A monopoly in the practical sense would mean that people have no choice but Apple. In reality, they have plenty of choices. Your point is merely that people aren't aware of the alternatives, but that doesn't make it a monopoly in a legal, or practical sense.

Re:Its a Fractal

[indiechild]

You're totally missing the point, and if you ever entered the portable music player business you would crash and burn horribly.

People don't want flashy gadgets with a million and one features which are hard to use. iPods took over the market because they are easy to use, and buying or managing your music is an absolute snap.

Other competitors were free to do the same, but they never did, because they think just like you do: they totally dismiss the power of usability and ease of use. Most people in the world aren't Slashdot geeks.

User interaction design and usability doesn't just apply to portable music players, it applies to just about anything you interact with in everyday life. A lot of people are so used to mediocre engineering and design that they take these frustrations for granted. Apple is a company that spends their time addressing these issues and making things easier for the user, but sadly few other companies do.

Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman sometime, it's a real eye opener.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post clearly explains why ipod is popular. However, the GP just pointed out that "Popular" does not imply "Superior" (a word that was used to describe Apple products)...

as far as usability goes, I'd have to buy, install and use a new operating system if I wanted to use an iphone or ipod. I'm not interested in that kind of "ease of use" so I buy other players and phones.

Re:Its a Fractal

[koiransuklaa]

Probably not, but you are one of the 500 million people who are allowed to use amazon MP3 store. The rest of us can't.

Buying DRM-free music online is pretty damn hard without itunes here...

Re:Its a Fractal

[dkf]

Your post clearly explains why ipod is popular. However, the GP just pointed out that "Popular" does not imply "Superior" (a word that was used to describe Apple products)...

If you had a product that was much more popular than all its competitors and which was visually distinct, wouldn't you claim that it was "Superior" too? It's just marketing. Don't sweat over it.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the Apple Ipod interface. It sucks. You are sucked into a proprietary Itunes program (unless you use Open-source alternatives but the common person won't know this) and the Itunes program sucks.

I had a Ipod Video that worked for about 6 months, then stopped working because the driver in XP refused to recognize the player 100% (it did recognize it, just Itunes didn't recognize the player). I went through a few hours of online forum searching to find that the problem was known, and it required a series of steps (basically removing the driver and installing it again) and a few tricks here and there to get XP and Itunes to recognize the player. The problem was that I'd have to repeat this step each time I wanted to reconnect my player to XP, and after a while even this fix didn't work.

I stopped using Ipod in 2006 and instead used a Sony Walkman MP3 player. Its been great..

Also, Ipod has this retarded wheel, which totally makes it hard for you to navigate as you often overshoot/undershoot the selection you want. On top of that, you can't use the wheel with the ipod in the pocket; you have to always see the screen. Contrast to most players that have buttons for everything; seperate volume buttons and track buttons from which you can press easily (digitally) in your pocket as you walk. Easy as cake and you don't have to pull the whole damn thing out of your pocket.

Ipod just sucks period. The reason people use it is just b/c of its trendy advertising and stylish design, and that everyoen else uses it so obviously you can't be less hip than your peers / media personalities/ etc.

Ugh I hate the Apple crapfest.

Re:Its a Fractal

[internettoughguy]

"Popular" does not imply "Superior"

It implies "more money"; which in the business world implies superior.

Re:Its a Fractal

[dunkelfalke]

"If you make something that any idiot can use, only idiots will use it."
This quote is very true in the case of iPod. I'll rather take a flashy gadget with OVER 9000 features.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Ipod has this retarded wheel, which totally makes it hard for you to navigate as you often overshoot/undershoot the selection you want. On top of that, you can't use the wheel with the ipod in the pocket; you have to always see the screen. Contrast to most players that have buttons for everything; seperate volume buttons and track buttons from which you can press easily (digitally) in your pocket as you walk. Easy as cake and you don't have to pull the whole damn thing out of your pocket.

This whole paragraph makes you sound like an absolute moron. First, you adjust the speed of scrolling through a list with the speed you move your thumb/finger. It sounds like you never figured this bit out. As for having to take the iPod out of your pocket to change tracks or adjust the volume, you're wrong again. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you press on "this" side of the block that it will skip forward a track, or if you press on "that" side of the block that you'll skip back a track. As for volume, the capacitance worked through every shirt I ever tried it with.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bkr1_2k]

This has help Apple survive, but it ultimatly leads to Apple's cyclical demise.

What demise is this? I've been hearing about Apple's demise for 20 years now, and they're still going strong. In fact, they're getting stronger.

Google and Apple will be able to co-exist just fine. Apple may lose a little market share, but I'm sure they'll survive. iTMS isn't their wellspring anyway. It's a helluva bonus, but it's not their primary breadwinner, and as far as I know, isn't expected to be any time soon.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole paragraph makes you sound like an absolute moron. First, you adjust the speed of scrolling through a list with the speed you move your thumb/finger. It sounds like you never figured this bit out.

Yes good point. I did figure this out, but I was getting at what happens when you've run through the long list of songs and you want to hone in on the right one. If you spin it too fast, it goes over one song, then you spin it back and it goes below one song. Its easy to overshoot even if you do it slowly.

As for having to take the iPod out of your pocket to change tracks or adjust the volume, you're wrong again. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you press on "this" side of the block that it will skip forward a track, or if you press on "that" side of the block that you'll skip back a track.

Ok, you are right; I remembered this after I posted :P

As for volume, the capacitance worked through every shirt I ever tried it with.

Right again; however, I don't like having to second guess my volume by using an essentially analog switch that has no feedback on the min and max. If you have seperate volume buttons, you can easily calibrate your volume to the exact level you want, *without* taking the whole thing out of your pocket.

Lastly, my point is that with seperate buttons for most functions, you can navigate blindly through the pocket. With the Ipod, this just cannot be done. Try navigating a couple of folders up and down and then to the next folder for the precise artist you want, blindly. I could do this with my Creative Muvo in my pocket while I was running laps in the gym, or on the treadmill. Try that with the Ipod. Impossible.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bkr1_2k]

Giving away the source code wouldn't necessarily eliminate the issue of a malicious app "destroying the ecosystem", as you put it. Apple is never going to allow widespread "sharing" of apps unless they have the finger on them for this very reason.

Apple has always maintained a tight control over their systems, there's absolutely no reason to expect that to change now.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bkr1_2k]

They are superior, from a usability standpoint. That's the point of the GP. Technically superior, perhaps not, but who cares if I buy a "superior" product I can't or don't want to figure out how to use?

Re:Its a Fractal

[Zebedeu]

(The same thing goes for Android: either trust the app store tied to your phone or compile the code yourself)

No, it doesn't. In Android I can load an .apk (android install package) from anywhere and install it on my device. The only caveat is that I must enable this functionality in some option menu, otherwise I get an error message suggesting me to enable said option if I want to install the application.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bkr1_2k]

Well, you can buy music all over the place. But for the vast, vast majority of online music buyers when they think 'I want to buy a song', they think 'iTunes'.
How is RickRussellTX any different than anyone else? It's not like Amazon is some geek-only known site that is obscure and hard to find. Plus the application mentioned runs on more platforms (does iTunes run on linux yet???) and is arguably less "locked-in" and therefore more widely usable.

Re:Its a Fractal

[TheKidWho]

No, the recession in the USA started in 2007. These kind of things don't happen over night, it was building up for quite a while.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Dog-Cow]

And what makes an utter piece of unusable crap "superior"? If you only consider features, maybe you have a point. But then you are completely ignoring the GP's point, which is that for most people usability is the true measure of superiority.

Re:Its a Fractal

[asylumx]

In support of parent,

According the the National Bureau of Economic Research (the official arbiter of recessions) the current recession began in December 2007.

Reference (Sorry, I'd look for the reference on NBER's site but I'm at work and can't stay on /. THAT long!)

Re:Its a Fractal

[ElectricTurtle]

Apple's market share is increasing because Microsoft's is decreasing. Now is the perfect time for Google to swoop in and get market share from both of them with a broad, integrated set of competing products. This is exactly what they are doing, challenging IE (and Safari) with Chrome, iPhone (and Windows Mobile) with Android, iTMS with Audio, etc. Recessions are when people with resources have the best opportunities to lay the foundations for growth in the next cycle, and Google seems to be hatching all its eggs at the right time and in the right way.

Re:Its a Fractal

[db32]

They do have two methods. One is through the app store, and one through the developer program. You can sign up and get a key from Apple for $299 or something that will allow you to develop applications for your own enterprise deployment. Sure, it isn't exactly the best of choices, but the constant claim that it is App Store only is either dishonest or misinformed.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post clearly explains why ipod is popular. However, the GP just pointed out that "Popular" does not imply "Superior" (a word that was used to describe Apple products)...

If you had a product that was much more popular than all its competitors and which was visually distinct, wouldn't you claim that it was "Superior" too? It's just marketing. Don't sweat over it.

Bah, of course it is superior. Superior ingiving people what they want, in the same way a airplane or a tank aint superior to an ordinary car.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Saint Fnordius]

Of course, you can never fully eliminate the threat, but you can raise the bar high enough to eliminate most threats. By requiring the source code, it makes it harder for a black hat to actually hide malicious code. It might instead encourage more sharing of algorithms and snippets instead of full apps.

Besides, XCode and the iPhone developer kit only run on Macs, so Apple could spur more Mac sales to those looking to install their own apps.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Saint Fnordius]

My apologies, I meant this is how I think the deployment environment should be run: either have the code vetted by a gatekeeper you trust, or compile it yourself with the unstated assumption that if you can run a compiler, you can verify the code yourself and know the risks.

Re:Its a Fractal

[tyrione]

Either way, Apple hates being tied to vendors,

Which is funny to me, as they seem to have no problem tying people to them.

Don't misconstrue B-to-B with B-to-C.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Zebedeu]

I agree that what you suggest would be better than the current iPhone policy of only allowing market apps, but you'll also probably agree that an even better system is to let the user use his hardware however he sees fit, including letting him install whatever he wishes to, even if it is a binary installation file.

I mean, we do it everyday in our computers (even in Linux -- otherwise no Skype, Picasa or even decent nvidia drivers) and somehow it seems to work.

Why can't the users do the same on their mobile phones?

Re:Its a Fractal

[bravecanadian]

I think you need to look up de facto.

It isn't that people can't buy music somewhere else. It is that they are already familiar with iTunes and iTunes has such a huge mindshare that 90% of new competitors in this arena are left fighting over the scraps.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you clarify "Apple is dominant with their iPhone platform". Dominant in what? Overall sales numbers or percentage of phones sold or currently existing in the market? If either of those is what you are refering too, you are not correct. They may have the dominant "buzz" in the phone market but the buzz does not and is not translating to dominating the sales numbers in the world phone market. Meaning they have the most marketing hype but not the most sales. The new Chevy Camaro, Dodge Charger, and Porsche Panamera may be dominating the car mags and the office water cooler talk and buzz but the Hyundai Accent is still far outselling all three of them combined.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bravecanadian]

I disagree with you as far as the online music sales monopoly goes: Apple's real interest isn't in dominating the online music store business as much as it is maintaining dominance in the music player business. They want to sell iPods first, and the online store is merely an accessory. So no, I don't think Apple would retaliate by banning Google apps, especially if it could hurt sales of iPhones and iPods in any way. The music store is a valuable chess piece, but one Apple would sacrifice to protect the more important pieces on the board.

I would put forward that with the music player industry reaching saturation the focus is shifting from the iTunes store being a vehicle for selling iPods to the other way around. That is why they have been focused on adding more types of content to iTunes (tv shows, movies, etc).

That way they have repeatable sales to people who already have a device.

Re:Its a Fractal

[e-scetic]

The iPod may be easy to use, but the iTunes interface sucks big time in terms of usability. It's the total opposite of the iTunes philosophy, if you ask me. I don't think Steve Jobs has ever had to use iTunes, I think he'd have an aneurysm if he had.

Re:Its a Fractal

[nomadic]

I hear what you're saying, but I think Steve Jobs' benevolent dictatorship is what has made Apple so successful. If it wasn't for Jobs being a demanding tyrant, Apple products would be mediocre at best. The guy isn't exactly known for being friendly, but I admire his strive for perfection.

Benevolent? How is it benevolent? He's a classical narcissist, and Apple pretty much started in last place because of his early leadership. It took him over a decade of getting more management experience in other ventures before he was able to turn Apple around, and then he lucked out by getting some really top-tier designers.

As for the whole "quality" thing, I've owned two modern Macs, and both eventually broke down; one a laptop, because of a known design defect in how the hinge attached the screen to the computer (but it looked cool, which is what's important I guess), and an imac that just eventually ran down; the graphics were shot and the power supply didn't work.

Re:Its a Fractal

[jedidiah]

It's not just good enough to try and figure out when the absolute beginning
of the recession was. This recession has been perceived differently by
different people. People that tend to buy overpriced phones like the iPhone
are in a more upscale demographic and thus were probably personally effected
by the recession much later than others.

For pretentious conspicuous consumers who shop at the Apple store, the recession
probably started later. Even now they might not even perceive it as a problem.
This is the value of catering to a more upscale market. The likes of Daddy Warbucks
will weather severe economic downturns much better than Joe Sixpack.

Re:Its a Fractal

[jedidiah]

Superior UI? That's disputable.

Now that they have marketshare, they have a large group of consumers that are
simply used to them. This will cause trouble for any other product with a
different interfaces no matter how good it is. It will be knocked simply for
being different.

MacOS suffers from this effect itself.

Re:Its a Fractal

[jedidiah]

The problem with the 80% Apple share is not the fact that you can or can't
buy music from someone else. The problem is that once you have bought DRM
encumbered products from Apple you are PERMANENTLY STUCK using their devices
and only their devices to access that content.

It's much like having a copy of Microsoft Money.

That's where their ability to distort the market comes from.

Got an old AAC file? Don't want to pay extra just to unlock it?

Now you are stuck with Apple. The same goes for audio books and movies.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Zancarius]

Well, you can buy music all over the place. But for the vast, vast majority of online music buyers when they think 'I want to buy a song', they think 'iTunes'. Apple (and other independent research firms) put their online music market share at something like 80%. That's certainly not a monopoly in the legal sense, but it is in the practical sense.

Huh, that's funny. Most of the people I know who look for music online immediately think of Amazon. With Amazon's MP3 service now having been around for quite a while, I hear less about "I'll find it on iTunes" and more about "Lemme get it from Amazon."

I think the term you're looking for isn't monopoly. It's "mindshare," and even then, I think mindshare is something Apple has been losing to companies like Amazon. That's a good thing.

Re:Its a Fractal

[BitZtream]

Okay, they've already done that. Now what?

Oh, you mean do it without the fee ... You should be a little clearer. You imply something that is flat out false. Anyone can compile apps for the iPhone with a little effort.

Re:Its a Fractal

[shutdown -p now]

that doesn't make it a monopoly in a legal, or practical sense.

A sufficiently large market share may alone be enough for the company to be considered monopoly, at least in some jurisdictions. I'm not sure how it works in U.S., but in EU, for example, if you have a sufficiently large market share, onus is on you to prove that you're not a monopoly, and the harder your share is, the harder it is to prove.

Re:Its a Fractal

[bkr1_2k]

And how did they get that marketshare? Arguably from having a "superior" UI.

Argue it all you want, but Apple didn't win the portable music marketshare they have by being Apple. They won it by appealing to consumers' desires, be it pretty colors, nice ergonomics, simple interface, or whatever. That is a superior product in all areas where non-techies give a damn.

I'll agree that now that they have the market share other products will suffer as you have indicated, but they got that market share for a reason.

Re:Its a Fractal

[k8to]

Er, that is a monopoly in the legal sense, although to make it legally so it needs a court to decide. Owning enough of the market that you can push others around is more or less what it means.

It's not a monopoly in terms of the word origin.

Re:Its a Fractal

[MasterCephus]

So when someone searches for something on the internet, you "google" it...when you record something from any DVR, you Tivo it... not to mention you trim your yard with your Weed-Eater, and when you sneeze you get a Kleenex. Branding happens and you can't stop that. Bringing in a new player, even if it's google will not stop that...

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

buy? feh buy. skreemr.com

Re:Its a Fractal

[John Whitley]

but in the cold hard truth of reality, Pages.app is no where near the sophistication of Word for Mac.

So freaking what? It would take years of team development effort to build an app as "sophisticated" as Word. Waiting until such a project was "finished" before releasing would be insane for two key reasons: 1) you'd be withholding a perfectly usable application from making revenue to support its development, and 2) you'd be depriving the product team of vital customer feedback in the interim. More to the point: perhaps, just perhaps, completely displacing Word isn't the point of the iWork suite.

Better still, Pages.app is one of the very few recent word processing/publishing type apps that has visibly rejected many absolute stupidities of the Word editing model. As compared to Word, Pages has truly usable document styles, no "invisible intangible turtles of formatting" (ever have the entire document's formatting go wonky in Word because you hit backspace? Talk about PCs flying out of highrise windows...), and is generally has much more modern design and usability throughout the features it does have. And I really, really pity folk who have to deal with writing academic papers to Word templates. Every one of them I've known (and this includes some intelligent, thoughtful, mild-mannered folks) end up *screaming* at their computer somewhere in the process.

This also gets to a big beef I have with some OSS document apps, e.g. OpenOffice, Thunderbird's email editing, etc. They bloody well just copied Word, including the major warts it has. In contrast to these, href="http://www.lyx.org/">LyX is a great example of providing a nice UI, hiding the complexities of the underlying TeX-based engine, yet still allowing rich access to that engine for power-users.

Re:Its a Fractal

[WNight]

They get the marketshare from comparing an ideal use of their product with exaggerated examples of the competition from years ago.

As in, how easy it is to setup a mac.

"Just plug it in and you're online!*"
(*If your router is configured, if you don't need to do anything non-standard, etc)

As compared to a PC where you must do all the hard work. Such a plugging it in and letting it auto-connect... The horror!

In other words, they combined the monitor and CPU, left out two cables, and claimed to have simplified computing. People who had last bought a PC in the early 90s and fought to get it online (winsock!) assume it must still be like that and figure Apple really did simplify things. (As if they invented DHCP, etc)

All Apple sells is a pretty box and the perception of ease. Really, it's the desktop equivalent of COBOL. Nice-looking, and because of all the syntactic sugar, non-scary. But in the end it's just more verbose and less powerful.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

I have actually set up several Macs. Setup and usage really ARE as easy as advertised. Yes, easier than PCs. More than anything else, the default options just happen to match the way the average home network is configured. And it helps that you don't have to go on a search and destroy mission to get rid of crapware, sign up for a subscription for the anti-virus program, or configure the "Windows Security Center" (an oxymoron if ever there was one). The things you are unlikely to change are not initially shown in the UI. Forget this "perception" stuff, it really IS easier. As for your "more verbose and less powerful" statement -- absolute BS unless you want to try and substantiate it. Lots of luck with that.

Re:Its a Fractal

[jedidiah]

Who are you trying to kid? If this is "networking" you are talking about then
you don't have a leg to stand on. Even I will admit that Microsoft does this
adequately well from a n00b standpoint and I hate them.

What Apple has going for it is not being an innovator of malware.

THAT IS IT.

Apple's usability advantage is highly disputable at this point.

As a long time Linux user it's really funny seeing the same "foomatic"
driver that Linux users for one of my printers being displayed from
within the comparable control panel applet in MacOS.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Anonymous Coward]

The current recession began, officially, in December 2007.

Re:Its a Fractal

[rantingkitten]

Apple is a company that spends their time addressing these issues and making things easier for the user,

Apple is a company that spends time making things easier for one particular type of user. If you don't think the way Apple proclaims you should, their stuff is far from easy.

I don't want my music centrally organised by an application. I want my song files in a directory of my choosing, which can be read by any application I see fit. If I want to move those files around, that's my problem. If I want to make copies of them into other directories for various experiments, playlist uploads, or whatever else, that's my perogative, and I want to do it through the OS's file manager. I don't want some application stealing file associations, or insisting that it use its own particular garbage (Quicktime) for playing audio.

Even something as allegedly simple as iTunes took me forever to figure out the first time I used it. But then, after finally figuring it out and shelling out a dollar for a song, instead of a useful song I could burn to CD, I got some m4a crap that wouldn't play in any of my media players, wouldn't be read by my car stereo, and all I could do was transcode it with Audacity. Then I had to uninstall iTunes, uninstall the party favors it left behind, and fix all my file associations.

I was done with iTunes on that day. Apple may be "easier to use" for a certain type of person, but certainly not for me, and they delivered a terrible, unusable product. iTunes will never see my business again.

I fully grant that this was about three or four years ago and things may have changed, but they had their chance to make their first impression, and blew it. I have no delusions that Apple is hurting because I refuse to do business with them, but to act like they are some pinnacle of interface guidelines is simply ridiculous.

PS. If Apple products, including OSX, iPods, and iPhones, are so bloody easy to use, why are my family members calling me all the time to help them fix this or figure out that?

Re:Its a Fractal

[simplexion]

I buy music at gigs. That way I know most of the money is going to who I want it to go to. The people that entertain me.

Re:Its a Fractal

[Saint Fnordius]

I suppose it's due to the risk of infecting other devices. Apple probably saw this as a chance to prevent the viral mess that plagued the pre-System 7 era of the Mac and the current Windows environments, as they expected iPhone owners to be less tech-savvy.

Apple isn't alone, as the list of hoaxes about viruses that infect phones per SMS or by merely calling an infected number show. Potential owners are already scared, so Apple needs to assure them that their devices are safe.

I don't envy Apple, as they are caught between the "I just want it to work" crowd and the "I want to modify it however I want" crowd. The former is more profitable, but the latter often invents new, cool ways to use the devices and that's also very good for Apple in the long run.

WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTunes

[DavidinAla]

The Wall Street Journal's story says that the plan will allow people to buy FROM iTunes and Amazon. According to this version, Google is just providing a link to the music providers when it comes to the purchase. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704597704574487423504899680.html If you're not a WSJ subscriber, copy the first sentence of the article and Google it. The link from there will allow you to read the whole thing.

iTunes?

[DogDude]

If this means a Google version of a crappy, bloated, needlessly complex music player, then good.

If this means a Google version of an overpriced digital music store that sells digital copies of songs that are only good enough to listen to on poor quality mp3 players, then good.

Why Apple decided to use the same name for both a software application and an e-commerce site is beyond me. Regardless, I'd love to see something better than both.

Re:iTunes?

[Daengbo]

Why Apple decided to use the same name for both a software application and an e-commerce site is beyond me

So that average people would equate the music player with the music store (with the protable music player tied to them).

Antitrust

[iamacat]

As a dominant content company Google must not be allowed to use it's search results to promote it's product offerings. They better have ironclad separation between the divisions.

Re:Antitrust

[madpansy]

Unless Google abuses its dominant market position through anti-competitive actions, they should be allowed to do whatever they please. Antitrust laws protect the consumer from companies that abuse a monopoly position. Merely having a monopoly is not illegal.

Re:Antitrust

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Apple's music player and their distribution channel?

Re:Antitrust

[Idiomatick]

Abusing their search monopoly to push into other areas could be. But given that often google services aren't the first link from google searches for them I would be a bit surprised.

Re:Antitrust

[mjwx]

Unless Google abuses its dominant market position through anti-competitive actions, they should be allowed to do whatever they please.

Exactly, Google attained it's search monopoly naturally. Natural monopolies occur when there is no competition or one product is so superior that other competitors cannot come close to matching it. This is what happened with Google but they should still be monitored for abuse. Thus far google has maintained it's dominant market position naturally.

Re:Antitrust

[Daengbo]

The first link (sponsored) on the search page for "web browser" is "Try Google's New Browser." The first link (non-sponsored) on the search page for "photo manager" is "Picasa 3: Free download from Google."

• "Maps" -> Google Maps (sponsored and not)
• "Documents" -> "Google Docs" (not sponsored)
• "Videos" -> "Google Videos" + "YouTube" (not sponsored)
• "e-mail" -> "Free Email from Google" (Sponsored)
• "Blogs" -> "Blogger" (non-sponsored)
• "Desktop search" -> "Google Desktop Search" (non-sponsored)

I'm sure there are many more, and I'm kind of disturbed. I think that the sponsored links are probably more dangerous for Google than the non-sponsored ones as long as the algorithm used to decide the non-sposored links is fair.

No matter what, these results sure show the dominance of Google.

Re:Antitrust

[miffo.swe]

Its all ok to be dominant in a market. Whats not legal is to use it to squash competition like Microsoft does. In short, actions that promote a monopoly is ok, actions that denote competition isnt. If Google would stop indexing competitors services, refuse to run their ads or make sure their browser wouldnt work with Googles services then it would be illegal. Google has a really long way to go before they are even near average market etics and even longer path to become as evil as Microsoft is.

Re:Antitrust

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, look at bing's results:
web browser: sponsored link is IE8, actual search results are wikipedia, firefox, opera, chrome (google's results: firefox, opera, chrome, chrome sponsored)
Photo manager: no ads, then photo manager 2010, acdsee, then picasa. Google's results: picasa, acdsee, something else, then photo manager 2010
maps: a bing/microsoft virtual earth map, sponsored by smartdraw.com. Actual results: maps.google.com, mapquest.com, maps.yahoo.com Google's results: same (sponsored by google maps)
Documents: docs.google.com, sponsored by bing cashback. Google's results: docs.google.com sponsored by docs.google.com
Videos: video.google.com, break.com, youtube.com Google's results: video.google.com, youtube.com, metacafe.com
e-mail: yahoo, wikipedia, email.com, live hotmail, mail2web, gmail (sponsored by hotmail). Google's results: yahoo, gmail, hotmail, mail.com, wikipedia, mail2web. Sponsored by gmail.
blogs: wikipedia, blogs.com, blogsearch, official google blog, blogs.myspace, whitehouse blog. Google's results: Blogger, wikipedia, blogspot, official google blog, blogsearch, technorati, blogs.com (sponsored by blogger)
Desktop search: Windows Desktop Search, wikipedia, google desktop (sponsored by microsoft enterprise search). Google's results: google desktop, windows desktop search, wikipedia. Sponsored by google search appliance.
Photos (not photo manager): photos.com, flickr, photo.net, photobucket. Sponsored by google image search. Google's results: flickr, photobucket, photos.com, map results for photos, picasa. Sponsored by the Life Photo Archive hosted by Google.

So let's see..
Web browser: similar results with a different sponsor.
Photo manager: Different ordering of the top four, but picasa's in it. Gets much better positioning on google though, but that could be selection bias (people who use picasa also use google?)
Maps: Both prefer google maps over mapquest over yahoo, sponsors are different.
Documents: Both prefer docs.google.com, sponsors are different.
Videos: Both have video.google.com and youtube.com in the top three.
e-mail: both prefer yahoo, gmail is 6th on Bing and second on google. Sponsors are the respective mail service from each company.
blogs: Probably the most disparity here. I'm very amused that the official google blog is as high as it is :)
Desktop search: google desktop and windows desktop search are in the top three. Sponsors aren't even related to the individual products really (they integrate with them, but aren't for the products themselves)
Photos (a more likely search): picasa isn't in Bing's top 5 (but is sponsored by google image search, which isn't related to picasa). Picasa's pretty far down in Google's results too.

I don't see this as a problem. I don't see any significant gaming of the search results in Google's favor, honestly.

Re:Antitrust

[daveime]

A company that advertises it's own products ? What a bunch of bastards !

Re:Antitrust

[bkr1_2k]

The problem doesn't come in until they stop showing other people's options. Just showing theirs first isn't abuse, it's smart business.

Google has long since passed the "do no evil" hat to other companies, in my book, but so far they're at least trying to stay in the "do less evil" realm as far as I can tell. They're too big now to do no evil, but they haven't turned completely evil yet. Some day, I suspect, they will, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt while we still can.

Re:Antitrust

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems perfectly reasonable from an "ordinary user" standpoint. Want to use Google Maps? Go to google.com and type "Maps".

I'm as four-eyed as the rest of you nerds and even I use this method sometimes (for example Chrome or Google Toolbar).

Re:Antitrust

[Daengbo]

Please read the parent:

Abusing their search monopoly to push into other areas could be. But given that often google services aren't the first link from google searches for them I would be a bit surprised.

I was just answering that. I'm not anti-Google. In fact, I use Google Docs almost exclusively for my office suite needs.

Re:Antitrust

[VGPowerlord]

One important note on the blogs search that you didn't mention: Blogger is owned by Google.

Re:Antitrust

[shutdown -p now]

The first link (sponsored) on the search page for "web browser" is "Try Google's New Browser."

It's funnier than that. If you go to Google search page (not type the query, just the main page) using IE, there's a fairly large orange banner in top right corner that says something along the lines of "Download a better browser now: Google Chrome". I think it disappears if you log in, since I can't see it anymore, but it definitely was there the other day.

Re:Antitrust

[shutdown -p now]

Natural monopolies occur when there is no competition or one product is so superior that other competitors cannot come close to matching it.

I'm not aware of the highlighted part being in the established definition of "natural monopoly". The definitions of I can find are usually based on high barriers to entry, not quality. Can you reference a definition which you've used?

Re:Antitrust

[shutdown -p now]

Its all ok to be dominant in a market. Whats not legal is to use it to squash competition like Microsoft does. In short, actions that promote a monopoly is ok, actions that denote competition isnt.

It's also illegal to use a monopoly in one market to gain advantage over competition in a different market by e.g. tying your other products with the one on which you have monopoly, or using one to promote the other.

Like, you know, why Microsoft was forced to provide a browser selection screen in E.U...

Re:Antitrust

[Idiomatick]

Thats not dishonest though, thats just an ad. Messing with search results might be a bit more problematic.

Re:Antitrust

[miffo.swe]

Making it hard to use one product without another is illegal if you have a monopoly. Google is going every step they can making it easy to use their products with whatever you want and whomever you are, friend or foe. Its a huge difference between tying products and promote products.

The reason Microsoft was forced to provide browser selection was because of a large range of bad conduct. All the way from artificially tying the browser to the OS to striking exclusive deals with OEMs that forbid them to ship any other browser than Internet Explorer on new computers.

As soon as Google does stupid things like that ill be the first on the barricades but they have been behaving very good up until now. In comparison Microsoft started out with Qdos that was tricked away from its creator. Said Qdos was an outright clone of CP/M and contained CP/M source code.

The differences between Google and Microsoft are huge by any measure. Their recent attempts to portrait Google being at least as bad as Microsoft lacks one crucial thing, anything bad Google has done. The best dirt they can come up with are things Microsoft already does but ten times worse.

Re:Antitrust

[mjwx]

The definitions of I can find are usually based on high barriers to entry, not quality. Can you reference a definition which you've used?

Having to compete with a product that is of an extremely high quality or so far advanced of your own presets itself as a high barrier to entry.

Apart from that you are right, quality is not typically a barrier to entry, the word I used was superior which can be defined as above the average in excellence. In Google's case superior refers to Google's search technology which is quite far advanced from any of their competitors. this persents a cost and/or technolgy barrier to entry

There are markets to which a minimum standard of quality comes with a very high price, the Airliner industry for example, to produce a jet or turboprop airliner that is up the international aviation standards is quite expensive, this has served to create the Airbus/Boeing duopoly which has only recently challenged by the likes of Bombardier and Embraer and only in the small short range jet market, heavies and super heavies will be Airbus/Boeing for a while yet.

It's a music search feature

[tlhIngan]

According to TechCrunch, it's a music search with the option to do limited streaming. So you can search for music, preview them, then either use those services to buy or use iTunes/Amazon to buy it.

Re:It's a music search feature

[zenslug]

From what I understand, Amazon and iTunes are not purchasing options. I could be wrong.

Re:It's a music search feature

[L4t3r4lu5]

So, it's more of a rival to Spotify, then? Stream music, offer links to purchase.

eh....

[djupedal]

> "According to people familiar with the matter"

Which in today's terms means 'we made this whole thing up' just to fill a gap in the so-called news...

Re:eh....

[lsllll]

Which in today's terms means 'we made this whole thing up' just to fill a gap in the so-called news...

Not necessarily. The stars are aligned for this to happen. Look at these points:

1. Most iPods and iPhones are used by Windows users. You can deduce this by the sheer number of Windows machines over Macs.
2. Most users of iTunes have a love/hate relationship, specially those on Windows. (Ok. Maybe most hate it, except the Mac users) I have never seen such popular software remove the user SO MUST from the hardware it enables the user to use.
3. Google has the cash to undermine/underbid the iTunes store prices. Hell, they might even subsidize the cost of the media at the beginning, like they do everything else (note: They give everything away for free)
4. Google has the clout to convince record companies that this/competition will be a good thing.

All I can say is "About fucking time."

Re:eh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Having trouble finding the link, but there was an essay on the definitions found in essays:

"it is theorized that" means "I'm too lazy to do research on it, but here's my thoughts"

"An inside source" means "I think this"

"Several inside sources" means "my friends think so too"

"people familiar with the matter" means "I heard it around the water cooler"

Lala

[BlueBoxSW.com]

I hope it's not a crappy knock-off, like when they launched Google Video.

Even the goodwill of their name couldn't save that horrible site.

No wonder a couple months later they bought YouTube.

This time maybe they'll buy Lala.com.

If you want a good browser-based iTunes store, that's it.
 

No

[mr100percent]

Is Google about to go head to head with iTunes? No, but they are about to go head-to-head with Amazon.

Re:No

[madpansy]

Lest we forget, Amazon started out as an online book retailer. Over the years they've built up a huge and incredibly efficient warehouse infrastructure and are now the largest online retailer, carrying much more than just books and mp3s.

Having said that, it does seem like Amazon is being attacked on all fronts. In digital music they have to compete with Apple and soon Google. I'm not sure whether Google wants to get into selling e-books, but with their planned store of out-of-print material, they will have the infrastructure to do so. And in the retail sector, among others like Target and Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart is already a behemoth in meatspace. It's possible that they can take Amazon's top spot in online retail.

Re:No

[maxume]

Amazon is also a pretty significant technology company at this point.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting sanzenpuss got the headline wrong? Where do you think you are?

A little sample of what's to come

[clem]

Google audio (BETA)

Lyric Search: Carry a laser down the road that I must travel

Did you mean: Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel?

Re:A little sample of what's to come

[rhenley]

Lyric Search: Excuse me while I kiss this guy

Did you mean: "I Want Your Sex" by George Michael?

Re:A little sample of what's to come

[Anonymous Coward]

Lyric Search: This song blows but'll still make millions.

Did you mean: Nickleback?

Re:A little sample of what's to come

[Fengpost]

Lyric Search: I see a bathroom on the right

Re:A little sample of what's to come

[Frankie70]

Isn't that good?

http://www.amiright.com/artists/mistermister.shtml

10 cents a song and I'm there

[Anonymous Coward]

10 cents a song and I'm there.

Anything more than that, I'm not there, as it makes no sense to charge more than that for a song in an inferior format (compared to CD) such as .mp3.

Ah well, until the online music vendors come to their senses, there's always "free" P2P sites like Skull&Crossbones Harbor, and the like.

Why audio?

[MahariBalzitch]

Why doesn't Google stop delving into all these other markets and just stick to what it knows?: SEARCH. I can just see the day in the near future that Google is disliked as much as Microsoft because it was being a monopoly. Good things never last unfortunately...

Re:Why audio?

[The MESMERIC]

What would you do if you had 1 billion dollar on your bank account, and a fair amount of free time.

... Exactly.

Re:Why audio?

[GoochOwnsYou]

Did you the same thing to Apple when they got into the music business? or in the phone business?

Android has alot of potential, ChromeOS I am yet to be sold on the idea of cloud based desktops but time will tell. Lets not forget Apple made computers and operating systems. What are they doing in the music business? Or the Phone business? Because there is a market there. Do you really think Apple is entitled to a monopoly?

Re:Why audio?

[MahariBalzitch]

Good point. People with money do whatever they want, whether they should or not.

Re:Why audio?

[dougisfunny]

The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!

Re:Why audio?

[Techman83]

Diversification makes sense in a business, it means if one section is doing poorly, the other sections can keep the business afloat.

Re:Why audio?

[Itninja]

Yeah! Why doesn't AT&T stick to telephones and telegraphs? And who the hell does Yamaha think it is making industrial robots and motorcycles? Stick to musical instruments guys! Sheesh!

Re:Why audio?

[Saint Fnordius]

If you think about it and read the reports, it seems as if this is exactly what Google is doing: sticking to search. The difference is that this time it's about searching for songs to download and/or purchase.

Re:Why audio?

[VGPowerlord]

Amusic Anecdote from the early 2000s:

Me: Gee Brain, what are we going to do tonight?
Canadian friend: The same thing we do every night, Pinky: watch Bush try to take over the world!

What's with the tags?

[Nebulious]

A story is posted about Google apparently engaging in some healthy (and frankly long needed) competition against Apple/Amazon, and the tags we get are 'donoevil,' 'queuethefanbois,' and 'fuckgoogle.' At least someone came along and put a ! in front of the last one but the tag being there at all is an artifact of seriously unconstructive vitriol. This is a story about Google expanding into new markets, not about Google doing anything wrong. These tags must be here accidentally at best and as flamebait at the worst.

Re:What's with the tags?

[gzipped_tar]

And in other news, you *are* really new here.

Re:What's with the tags?

[PReDiToR]

So on top of knowing the contents of your email, the names of people you talk to, your voice print, your credit card details, your bank numbers, your search history and your reading preferences, where you live, your IP address, photos of you, your friends family and pets, and how technologically inclined you are ... Now you want them to know what kind of music you like too!

Wait, that came out wrong, I was just watching that horse running off down my garden and thinking about a door that I could do to go and lock.

It isn't about them doing something wrong per se, it is about them being so far reaching in their ability to data mine each and every person that uses their services.

Think what would happen if Microsoft bought them out because they got bored of playing internet billionaires? Or if the government decided that they were a threat to security and absorbed them into itself for our protection. Some thoughts just aren't pretty and that is why some people tag "fuckgoogle".

What's worse is that if you don't voluntarily hand over all this information you are in the minority (or soon will be) and that itself will mark you as a person of interest.

Re:What's with the tags?

[shutdown -p now]

So on top of knowing the contents of your email, the names of people you talk to, your voice print, your credit card details, your bank numbers, your search history and your reading preferences, where you live, your IP address, photos of you, your friends family and pets, and how technologically inclined you are ... Now you want them to know what kind of music you like too!

It isn't about them doing something wrong per se, it is about them being so far reaching in their ability to data mine each and every person that uses their services.

Personally, I don't mind. I already use GMail, and I also already use last.fm, which Google presumably indexes (and anyway if they wanted to know specifically, they could just go check).

That said, no-one is forcing you to use Google for any of those things. In virtually all markets where Google offers its services, they have competition which is quite on par in terms of features and quality, if not in terms of marketshare. In many cases Google was simply the first one to do something right (note: not necessarily the first one to do something in general), but as soon as they do, others follow. The choice to use or not to use Google services in particular is entirely yours.

Think what would happen if Microsoft bought them out because they got bored of playing internet billionaires? Or if the government decided that they were a threat to security and absorbed them into itself for our protection. Some thoughts just aren't pretty and that is why some people tag "fuckgoogle".

Shouldn't it really be "fuckmsftandgovt", then? ~

In any case, I think you should be more worried not about government buying out corporations to get access to their data on you, but rather about corporations buying out government...

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Anonymous Coward]

I welcome any alternative to the iTunes Store interface. Considering that Apple prides itself on its intelligent and intuitive user interfaces, the iTunes Store boggles my mind. I gave my father a gift certificate to buy some songs for his iPod, but he got frustrated quickly and handed the controls over to me. After a few minutes of navigating the slow, labyrinthine interface myself, I threw in the towel and got the songs he wanted through other channels. If not for the luxury of being so tightly integrated with the hardware and iTunes itself, I doubt Apple could get away with pushing something so clunky. Hopefully, Google can remedy that.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Search engine? There were plenty of search engines before Google came along

Except that they invented a better way of searching that allowed for real results that could not be faked by simply having great meta tags?

Android? Oh look, Apple are doing really well with phones, let's be on the cutting edge and... create a phone

Except that they created a phone with a new type of operating system, simply put a new platform to design on which people would argue is easier to develop on

Google maps? Easy to use but hardly a new concept

I don't know about you but i never get accurate anything on map quest or the like, google did a great job here. also they integrated satellite images before anyone that i can remember. on top of i haven't seen anyone else driving cars around to give a street view of the map either.

Gmail? wow!! how imaginative - a decade after online email they blow everyones minds with, you guessed it... online email

uhh, yea they did blow everyones mind with a simple way of doing email that made sense with a set of tools that makes managing your email easy. i'm finding that you have no idea what google has done

I put forward that on an innovation per IQ point Google is perhaps the most inefficient use of intelligence ever.

wow do some research next time, google designed one of the most efficient servers and OS for their search engine. also the hardware that they developed for it is of their design not someone else. i guess you have never seen how all those "IQ points" developed how they manage all their equipment which was unique and new for data centers. heres a small article on some of it http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/02/googles-data-center-secrets-revealed/

not a fan boy, i am not a "pro-google" person just someone who can't stand ignorant people. (i do not own any mac/apple or android equipment)

i suppose you sir need to learn to google.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[tibman]

I put forward that you cannot survive a year without touching/using a google technology. If you truely believe google tech is mediocre.. go a year without google search/mail/reader/youtube/maps/docs/books/code/chrome/images/news/android and of course.. no clicking google ads.

Search engine? There were plenty of search engines before Google came along

Agreed, but why did google become so popular? It was great and very minimal. We didn't want "web portals" filled with ads, news, and junk.. just a simple place to find sites from. Was that innovative? heck no.. was it very intelligent? yes.

iTunes store?

[Toonol]

I doubt I'd buy music from them any more than I would from the iTunes store... but if they are going to come out with some music and media management software to compete with the iTune software, I'd be very interested. Every one I've tried, ESPECIALLY iTunes, has been crap... so I'm still organizing all my music in standard file directories and text editing playlists in notepad.

My second thought is... surely Google would be more receptive to indie and non-professional artists?

Been doing it for years in China already

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's been doing this in China for a couple of years already www.google.cn/music. It's ad-supported and provides completely free mp3 downloads and streaming, without DRM and with scrolling lyrics sync'ed to fast-forward and rewind and fully licensed content from all the big four record companies (including both Chinese and Western artists). It's pretty much exactly what you'd want in an online music service. It's also IP-blocked unless you're in China.

Is it the music or the player?

[Whiteox]

The trouble with iTunes as a front end is that it is designed to be half the ui of an ipod. A lot of non-ipod iTunes users, use it to sort, catalog and play their libraries and it does an excellent job at that. Try and export to a non-Apple media player and you get problems as it stuffs up the filenames.

The problem with iPods, is that you need iTunes to sync/delete/add stuff.
So if Google or whomever would come up with an iTunes like front-end with decent performance and could make it equally good at consolidating media, you'll have a VLC like multimedia player that can sort, convert, catalog, backup, share, stream, import and export with installable codecs and plugins then count me in.

Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[orbitalia]

Here in Sweden 1 in 5 of the population has a Spotify account. I think Google would do themselves a service by coughing up a huge sum of money and buying Spotify which already has pretty much all music you would want, android, ipod, apple, pc applications, high quality ogg vorbis streams and a very loyal user base.

Spotify is the next big thing, the US just hasn't seen it yet, their business model is great, and their software works really well.

Spotify may not be for sale, but Google has deep pockets and a link up would knock out MS and Apple easily I think.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[dcarmi]

I agree, Spotify and perhaps We7 are two companies that would fit the "Its the Internet, stupid" approach that Google have.

The big problem for this model of music provision, is mobile coverage and data plans. It's the phone companies that need pushing into the 21st century.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[L4t3r4lu5]

Spotify doesn't have good business model.

I had a paid account for a month, then switched back to free as the intrusion of the advertisements was next to nill. I simply don't notice. They hardly ever advertise for products I'd even want anyway; I listen to heavy metal and other alternative music; The amount of times I've had mobile phones (I already have a great phone), pop music (can't stand it) and other useless chod pushed into my ears would be amusing if it didn't cost Spotify every time it happened.

I'd probably go back to the paid subscription if their "Music you may like" feature worked. At the moment, however, after listening to Alestorm, Korpiklaani, Dream Theatre, Prodigy, and Radiohead, I'm being presented with Kanye West, and other mainstream pop artists.

In short, they've made their "free" (ad-supported) service too good.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

I listen to heavy metal and other alternative music

lemme guess, tool? ;)

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[orbitalia]

I hear what you are saying and I agree of course, although there are higher quality streams available in the paid service (the free streams sound better than an average MP3 to me though!).

The plan is that for the free service they will get paid enough via advertising to make money, so the paid or free is included in their model. I have noticed more frequent adverts in the free service lately though, I think they are tryin to make the free service somewhat less attractive.

Who wants to "own" music these days anyway, I don't want to buy CD's or files, I want instant access to everything ever recorded at superb quality and with a nice interface wherever I want - as you say with some help for me to find the things I might like.

They seem to be adding things fast so expect the music you might like to work better in the near future.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[koiransuklaa]

I'd probably go back to the paid subscription if their "Music you may like" feature worked.

Tell me about it. I'm not interested in country music (last.fm tells me I've played Carrie Underwood twice, otherwise I can't find anything that could be in that genre)... So, what's in my "Music you may like"?

Country, bluegrass, progressive country, rockabilly, traditional country and more country. Well done!

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[bkr1_2k]

In short, they've made their "free" (ad-supported) service too good.

Which is exactly why it would be a good fit for Google. The ad-support is where Google makes its money, primarily, so it makes sense. I'm sure if Google would purchase them, they'd be able to fix the poorly directed ad thing very quickly, as I've noticed a reasonably good correlation between the ads presented to me on gmail (when I actually log in via the web rather than a pop reader) and what I'm reading/discussing at the time.

 

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[L4t3r4lu5]

Incidentally, yes, but recently not so much. As good as the music is, I'm a little tired of the pseudo-philisophy. AEnima is still a great album, though.

I was referring more to 80's rock and metal, some nu-metal, some thrash... Hell, I've been known to put on grindcore if I'm in a particularly foul mood (Or there's a chav with his car stereo playing too loud outside. You'd be amazed how effective playing The Berzerker is at clearing out ne'er-do-wells).

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[manekineko2]

As someone without access to Spotify, what's the benefit of Spotify versus the all-you-can-eat style music subscriptions like Rhapsody or Napster?

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Daniel Ek, is that you?

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[BitZtream]

We've got spotify on this side of the pond too Sven. Its just not really that impressive.

Spotify is kind of like buying a house versus renting.

Yes, you can rent, have to do less work and throw your money away supporting someone else. Its the socialist in you that likes it.

We prefer to own, have control over, and be able to know our monthly payments are not just going away and buying us nothing more.

We also don't all live in 3 cities that have great cell coverage, which people never seem to be able to grasp. We can't use Spotify in a LARGE portion of our country where people live. We can however, listen to our iPods with music on them all day long, and we continue to listen to them regardless of what Spotify feels like doing.

You rent, we buy. Disney must love you guys.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[hazydave]

That sounds so much cooler than saying "2/3 of the people in Chicago have iTunes account". But not quite as cool as pointing out, if iTunes users had their own country, it would be around the size of Mexico, Japan, or Russia (numbers very a bit, depending on the source).

Spotify is too limited, anyway... it could work on an iPhone, but not an iPod, at least not without a Wifi connection.. and, well, Apple's approval. We already have Pandora here, which I would consider a better kind of technology for streaming audio (eg, like radio, it introduces music I might not know, but based on expressed preferences, I'm likely to like).

It's going to take a phenomenon like Google and Android, I suspect, to put a real dent in Apple's iPhone/iPod/iTunes market. And that's all based on purchases, not so much rentals or streaming. Apple's stuff doesn't change much anymore.. that's a pretty clear indication you're seeing a mature market. You need something profound to shake that up.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[Vegeta99]

Spotify isn't the only service that has "Huh??" moments. I use Pandora One (Yeah, I paid the $36 for a year so I can skip more than 12 songs a day.), and sometimes, I don't know what it was thinking.

Actually, Pandora's worst offense is about the same as what you're saying about Spotify. I have a station defined as "Rob Zombie + Tool", and then about 100 songs that I've thumb-upped or down as they've played. It will do the same thing, "Now that you've enjoyed 3 hours of the station that you designed to only play this genre right now, here's some Kanye West!" The asshole DJ that would play a random pop song in the middle of a Doors marathon lives on.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[WiiVault]

Spotify would knock out MS and Apple easily? Really? Thats a load. Spotify is cool sure, but in the end hardly innovative or original. 1 in 5 in Sweden mans next to nothing to a company like Google.

Re:Spotify not ITunes will be the big competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Good question - my guess is that it's the user experience: you launch the client, type in the name of any artist, a list of songs pops up, and within a couple of seconds you're listening to the one you had in mind. I have no idea how they manage the buffering, but you'd never know the songs were streamed rather than played from your hard drive. You can browse through the library (with artwork and biographies) until you find something interesting, then leave it playing in the background, which hits the sweet spot between a music store and a radio station. Napster and Rhapsody are too far down the store end, while Pandora's too far down the radio end.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[pudro]

All this hype about omgz Google is so innovative. Let's take a step back and see what they have actually created shall we?l

...

So all you fanbois - with all the fanfare and hype - what exactly has Google really invented or developed that is so way out there?

Your problem here is clear - you don't know the difference between innovation and invention.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Anonymous Coward]

Google going to resell music. Woohoo. Another intermediary to burn money. Another link in the "Songwriter > Musician > Label > Wholesale > Itunes > A dozen resellers > Customer" chain that inflates prices.

amen! lol

[Weezul]

Except Apple has always been fashion darling, not a tech darling. Indeed, Apple's technology is always fairly far behind, but Jobs' 1-button obsession does create fashion conscious products. Apple will always find users who'll pay more for fewer features when existing features are presented more fashionably.

I dislike the closed source culture surrounding Apple's computers and strongly dislike the iPhone's restrictions, but Apple's fashion awareness has helped many people. Just look how Apple made incremental back up fashionable. Can you imagine how much time and how many irreplaceable family photo albums that move has saved?

Its the start of a new way to sell Android Apps

[phonewebcam]

Lets face it - the Android Market mechanism itself sucks. If they were gonna do a desktop buy-n-sync system, the iTunes model is the one to follow. Looks like they are just following Apples pattern.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[indiechild]

Huh? Granted, iTunes Store can be slow at times, but I think it's easy enough to use.

What specific usability problems did you run into?

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[daveime]

We didn't want "web portals" filled with ads, news, and junk.. just a simple place to find sites from

Maybe Yahoo could learn from this.

ads

[Anonymous Coward]

are they now also going to insert ads into the songs i listen to?

One Big Problem:

[bezenek]

Many of the buyers in the primary demographic will hear, "Google Audio," and not realize Google is selling music. -Todd

Sensational headlines vs reality

[chabotc]

Another example of "Sensational headlines sells", before this ./ post even went live more details became available that in fact this is about adding music to the search results and that the songs found can be played through iLike, last.fm, lala, etc.. and offer 'Click to buy' links to iTunes and Amazon.

So no, Google is not taking on iTunes or Amazon, in fact it will help sell their music.

That doesn't mean however this isn't a very nifty feature :)

Screenshots and more info are available at:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/google-to-partner-with-ilike-and-lala-for-new-music-service/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/google-music-service-the-screenshots/

Re:Sensational headlines vs reality

[Old97]

You are ruining the fun and squelching the drama by introducing facts. Stop it! Now!

Re:Sensational headlines vs reality

[WiiVault]

Shhhhhhhh don't quell the satifaction of the average Apple hating slashtard!

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon it'll be "If you don't want to buy it from iTunes or Amazon, just copy the first line of the song and Google it. The link from there will allow you to hear the whole thing."

+- Technology: Google To Take On ITunes?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is iTunes you iNsensitive Clod!

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> I put forward that you cannot survive a year
> without touching/using a google technology.

Oh come on, set a real challenge! It's easy to avoid the Google data aggregator and many of us do. Look-see!

google search: Alltheweb, cuil, clusty
mail: Tuffmail
[RSS] reader: Liferea
youtube: LiveLeaks
maps: Multimap
docs: Lyx, Gnumeric
books: A library and an Agfa Snapscan :)
code: Sourceforge
chrome: FF
images: Alltheweb
news: BBC, RSS
android: Nokia 6210
no clicking google ads: All blocked by Privoxy.

There is nothing there that is unique to Google, nor innately innovative. Their search was ground-breaking in 1997, but since then Google have had to buy innovative companies to keep abreast of the rest.

Satan or not...

[irving47]

Let's see, we all know about Google's Don't be evil mantra...
What is it they say?
Gotta shake hands with the devil to do the lord's work...
If you dance with the devil you're bound to get burnt, or something like that...
So now they're going to get in bed with the devil (RIAA)... What are the results of that? Volcanic herpes or the business equivalent?

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gone over a year without using google search/mail/ready/youtube/maps/docs/books/code/chrom/images/news/android.. in fact, i don't need any of that to enjoy the internet :)

I got a GPS - Check
I got a web browser - firefox - Check
I can't stand youtube - check (comment system SUX)
Books? I don't like what they're doing. Guttenburg was doing just fine
News? not a news junkie
Android - don't need another phone

Jobs is 100% right or 100% wrong

[Aqualung812]

I think Steve Jobs' benevolent dictatorship is what has made Apple so successful

Yes, and no. I think this style of leadership has great strengths, but it opens Apple up to huge weaknesses. My iPhone is the only Apple device I have owned, and having had every other platform other than Android, I can say it is the best phone I have had.

However, it does have many faults. It does seem like it was created by one man. If that one person decided the iPhone should do something (play music, manage calls), it does it VERY well. If they either decided it shouldn't do something or didn't consider it (multitasking, syncing to multiple computers), then it can't be made to do it. With Windows Mobile, it never did anything well, but I could force it to do about anything half-assed. The iPhone is wonderful and worthless, depending on what you ask it to do.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Dog-Cow]

The problem he ran into was his own limited intelligence. A blind monkey could figure out how to activate an iTunes gift card.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[mathx314]

The GP's point wasn't that Google doesn't have competitors (remember, he said that Google wasn't innovative, just good at what they do). And while in theory you could replace all of Google's products, you probably wouldn't want to. Be honest, do you really think that cuil is a superior search engine to Google's? Do you really think that LiveLeaks has the breadth of content that YouTube has? Does Alltheweb really do image searches as well as Google? Google might be evil, but they are damn good at what they do.

How did this get down to an iPod thread?

[lightrush]

How did this get down to an iPod thread?

This ought to be good..

[Anonymous Coward]

...pulls out popcorn.....

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[bravecanadian]

I put forward that you cannot survive a year without touching/using a google technology. If you truely believe google tech is mediocre.. go a year without google search/mail/reader/youtube/maps/docs/books/code/chrome/images/news/android and of course.. no clicking google ads.

You can't be serious.

I didn't realize the dawn of humanity was 1998 when Google came around.

Jobless recoveries

[tepples]

The recession didn't start in 2007, it started in late 2008.

The recession before that was in 2001 (.com crash + World Trade Center demolition). The recoveries in the past two decades have been more jobless than before. Recovery largely comes in the form of increased productivity per employee and the development of foreign economies rather than increased domestic employment. This makes perception of a recession last longer than the official economic figures.

It's cardboard

[tepples]

Or at least pretend to take over the world from a story box.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

No google ads?

You had me up until that last bit... :(

Need for speed

[Nerdposeur]

Picasa is one of the few pieces of software that impresses me, and continues to impress me more with each revision.

I agree. And I'll add another reason: it's fast. I love that.

iTunes has nice features, but that sucker crawls on my (relatively new) Windows XP machine. If Google can trounce iTunes in the speed department, I'd take a serious look at their offering.

On that topic: how fast is Songbird, or other full-featured "library" players? (I do use Winamp when I just want quick access to specific songs, and it's fast, but it's a less full-featured program.)

Re:Need for speed

[norminator]

Over a year ago, I was still using a 600MHz P3 as our main family computer. Picasa was one of the few programs that ran well on it. And it ran very well.

Tips from a long-time mpd user

[jonaskoelker]

Here's a neat trick that I use to make mpd work better for me:

Use xbindkeys, set ctrl-alt-shift-f to run mpc next and ctrl-alt-shift-d to run mpc pause. Then you can control your music player without switching away from emacs/firefox/pornview/.... (add bindings of 'a' to prev and 's' to stop if you feel like it; I do.). I'm quite amazed that no music player I know of does something like this by default (or makes it easy to do)---and the "Multimedia Keys" are no substitute, as they're a long distance away from your hands when you're typing (even worse when running pornvi... uh, emacs!)

I can also recommend binding a key to xterm -geometry 80x3-32-64 -e 'watch -tn1 mpc'. That'll give you nice "mpd status window" in the lower right of your screen.

(strictly speaking, I'm binding ctrl-alt-shift-[aoeu] because I'm using the dvorak layout, but that's [asdf] on qwerty, so it all makes sense... yes?)

Re:Tips from a long-time mpd user

[Platypii]

I'm quite amazed that no music player I know of does something like this by default (or makes it easy to do)

Amarok does it. Settings > Configure Global Shortcuts. I use the windows key as my shortcut instead of ctrl-alt-shift like you but same idea.

Gotta love Amarok!! (now if only I could use the Amarok 1 interface with MPD backend... that would be the holy grail!)

Re:Tips from a long-time mpd user

[Anonymous Coward]

Merry Christmas

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[VGPowerlord]

No google ads?

You had me up until that last bit... :(

That one's easy: I don't use Google ads.

Wait, you're not counting viewing them are you? 'cause those aren't by choice*.

*I don't consider "install Ad Block Plus and an appropriate filter" a valid choice here, because I'm not specifically choosing to block Google ads.

googles success rate is pretty low

[peter303]

Only a fraction of google's software offerings beat the competition. And even smaller fraction of that make any money. Most dies a slow death fallingoff the edge to the google toolbar.

Re:googles success rate is pretty low

[lightrush]

And facts supporting that are?

Re:googles success rate is pretty low

[WiiVault]

To be fair its hard to know for sure. Still depsite the quality I have never seen anybody other than myself using Picasa or any of the other Google apps.

Re:amen! lol

[jedidiah]

OTOH, they could have just encouraged people to use the Finder to
drag their photo library to an attached USB drive.

Infact, current Mac culture seems to be specifically avoiding that
sort of thing. More of the basic system features are being hidden
from the end users never to be seen again. Instead of having the
old school saavy Mac users they are creating a new generation of
co-dependents.

emusic!!!

[HardWoodWorker]

I prefer emusic. They're the first service that was cost effective and more convenient than piracy. They have all my music (I prefer electronica and industrial), so I never bother with iTunes.

If I want to pay iTunes prices and not deal with the BS DRM, I can go to Amazon.

I could really care less about another music store. They're probably just preparing for Android to hit iPhones with music capability.

A decent mp3 player on Linux...that would be interesting. Amarok is glacially slow and incredibly unstable. Rhythmbox is reasonable, but has bugs with ID3 tags that I never deal with in Musicmatch in the old days and Media Monkey today on windows.

Remember kids, Google's not a monopoly!

[The Altruist]

I wait for the day, and you know it's coming, when Google rolls out it's ChromeOS, and the EU demands that they give consumers the choice of which browser to use.

DRM/Apple/Amazon

[jDeepbeep]

and pushed DRM off the table (aided greatly by Amazon)

I don't know the overall metrics on this, but DRM was the very reason I abandoned iTunes and began purchasing my digital music at Amazon. Now, I notice that a downloaded MP3 file from Amazon will have an Amazon "song id#" embedded in the id3 data, and I cannot help but wonder if iTunes makes note of that when it scans my music library.

Please save us Google!

[grking]

I'm fed up of Apple's restrictive and prescriptive dictating of how I can and can't use my own products. I like my iPod Classic and I like my iPhone, but I can't use iTunes because I run Linux, and Apple of course say that is forbidden.

I've been using gtkpod to transfer music to the iPod Classic, but Apple have gone one extra step to ensure I can't use my iPhone that way under Linux. So if I use an OS Apple haven't rubber stamped I can't transfer music to my own phone. Thanks.

I'm looking forward to the day when Google pull all this together into an open Android device capable of replacing the iPhone/iPod.

Re:Please save us Google!

[BitZtream]

I like the fuel economy of Deisel fuel, but my car requires gasoline!!! I'm tired of those restrictive car manufactures telling me what my engine must use and how I can and can't use my own products!

Yes, you do sound as retarded as that statement.

You are using an OS that doesn't show up on the radar as more than a large duck, sorry if they don't support it, you knew they didn't when you bought the thing.

I'm so super pissed that iTunes doesn't run on the OS I wrote, those bastards are restricting my ability to use my devices and using their monopoly in the music player market to crush BitStreamOS!@$!@$ I know its not technically a monopoly or any whever even near it, but I'm going to talk out my ass anyway!@$

Do you realize how retarded these statements sound to anyone outside of your head?

Android will replace the iPhone I'm sure ... just like the Pre or the Storm or whatever the 'iPhone killer' was last week. You just don't get it. Apple does, hence why they own the music player market.

Re:Please save us Google!

[grking]

Your analogy is erroneous. It's more like a car manufacturer telling you that you MUST buy ONLY Exxon brand petrol, no other brand. It's got nothing to do with Apple "supporting" Linux. The community doesn't need Apple's support, they can support themselves. But Apple actively go out of their way to make sure their product is locked down and can only be used on the platforms on which they give their permission.

Re:Please save us Google!

[TheSunborn]

No, the fuckup is that Apple prevent others from writing software that interface with their music store. It's more like if ford said I could only use their fuel, even thou the car would work with any kind of fuel. (For keeping with the car analogy)

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[kwijebo]

Are you kidding? The only Google services you mention I ever use are search and maps. Both have perfectly reasonable alternatives.

Do you actually click on google ads? Why?

Now, I'm not arguing Google isn't innovative. They innovate, they just don't ever finish anything (except search).

Success is 5% inspiriation, 95% perspiration. Google has clearly hired inspired developers, I've never been convinced they've figured out how to focus most of those developers on things that make money.

So why did you get an iPod?

[argent]

Why did you reward Apple with your money, if you don't like their policies and don't want to run their OS? It's not like their hardware is all that exceptional. If I didn't like iTunes I sure as hell wouldn't have an iPod.

Re:So why did you get an iPod?

[grking]

There was no other mp3 player I could find with 16+ hours battery life and 160GB capacity. :-/

Re:So why did you get an iPod?

[grking]

Correction: 36+ hours battery life

Re:So why did you get an iPod?

[argent]

There was no other mp3 player I could find with 16+ hours battery life and 160GB capacity. :-/

Archos 7, 320GB, 39+ hours play time. It even runs Linux. And you can replace the battery.

Re:So why did you get an iPod?

[grking]

That looks awesome... but perhaps I should add a caveat, "that I can fit in my pocket" :) I would need both hands to pick that beast up.

Re:So why did you get an iPod?

[argent]

There are smaller and lighter alternatives as well, this is just the largest disk space and longest battery life I could find.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[bcrowell]

The Wall Street Journal's story says that the plan will allow people to buy FROM iTunes and Amazon.

Which is too bad, because more competition would have been really helpful, especially for linux users. I currently buy my music on amazon, but their linux support is extremely buggy. To buy an album (as opposed to individual songs), you have to use a special downloader app they provide. To their credit, they do provide a linux version, but their whole setup is just lame and buggy. When I've called with problems, the Indian tech support people always claimed that there's no support for anything but Windows and IE (even though amazon's web site offers specific information and software for linux). Right now, amazon probably has zero incentive to improve the situation. But if there was someone else willing to sell music to linux users, amazon would probably say to themselves, "Hey, linux users may only be 0.5% of our customers, but 0.5% is still millions of dollars, and now that we've got competition we should really get our act together."

Also, although I buy my music in mp3 format, a lot of people prefer less lossy formats. Right now, your only option is iTunes if you don't want mp3. Geographical restrictions are another issue that would probably get fixed if there were more competition.

Wasn't there a Disney DRM this yesterday?

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's a DRM ecosystem, could it be related to this...!?#%$!

Now I can finally

[Anonymous Coward]

...use that refund for all my Google Video purchases.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[tibman]

They innovate, they just don't ever finish anything

That describes the vast majority of all Open Source software.

A work in progress is still good and usable.. businesses don't like touching that sort of thing though. But like you said, they haven't figured out how to focus their developers on things that make money.. like stable/complete software and services. That being said, they still make plenty of money, not that they really seem to care.

Clicking on Google ads.. i'm sure i do, but which ones and why i can't remember. Not for random stuff, but ads for things i want (robot parts!), probably.

I like that 5/95 thing, how true and depressing, hah.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[Canberra Bob]

...Do you really think that LiveLeaks has the breadth of content that YouTube has?...

I always find it interesting when people refer to Youtube as great Google innovation. Youtube was bought by Google after it had become successful, hardly a product of the Google r+d department.

Re:WSJ reports that it's NOT competition for iTune

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I mention any problem activating the gift card? Reading comprehension a little low, eh? The problem was the computer slowed to a crawl as soon as I entered the store. On top of that, searching worked fine if you were looking for something specific, but the browsing sucks (compared, for instance, to Amazon, which shows alternative products people purchased, top selling items in detailed categories, and more sorting options). The Genius bar is clever and fixed this to a degree, but it could use better integration with the store.

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[mathx314]

I never said YouTube was a Google innovation. I'm just making the point that YouTube has much more content than any other video service and as such is likely to remain at the top (and also that as a result probably counts as the best video service on the web).

Re:Seriously - is Google innovative at all?

[UnknownSoldier]

> I put forward that you cannot survive a year without touching/using a google technology.

It might be painful, but with Bing & Yahoo that is relatively easy.

> but why did google become so popular? It was great and very minimal.

Yes as pic confirms.
http://img361.imageshack.us/img361/443/yahoovsgoogle1996to2005ys4.png

However, that is only 50% of the solution. Excite (before it became a web portal), and Altavista was also minimal, but google's search engine basically blew everyone else out of the water.

It already exists...

[Anonymous Coward]

..in China. music.google.cn is one the online music providers in China.
Only in China they have some agreement with the audio companies and they provide all musics for free.

Anonymously posted from the other side of the Great Firewall.
 

devices need to be DRUNK PROOF

[cheekyboy]

Too many techies engineers forget to do the DRUNK test.

If youre device is UNSUABLE when youre drunk, youre device is toast.

Make any device easy to use so even when youre half blind, cant see, and still can use it , then its good.

ie, large fonts, less words, more icons, logical intuitive layouts.