Last week that report came out showing about 6% of iPod users had switched from PCs to Macs and that another 7% plan on buying a Mac.
The margin of error in that survey was larger than either of those reported percentages. Therefore the reported "news" was worthless. If you look at Apple's figures you see all their dollar revenue increase comes from iPod sales while Mac sales are flat on the high-end and actually down on the low end. If there was a "halo" effect then it exists in the mind of analysts and Steve Jobs and is not being reflected in the harsh truth of revenues.
Furthermore, no figure was given or elicited for the percentage of PC users who had switched from using Macs.
Although I've never actually used TiVo I think the basic premise is the same, record the shows you want automatically and watch them whenever you have time.
It would be except that Tivo is burdened with nasty DRM that prevents Internet-wide show sharing, transfer to non-authorized machines, and so on. Tivo has even recently agreed to implement content-owner usage flags for recorded content - meaning that the content people will be able to delete shows based on their age or number of times viewed.
ReplayTV has done a much better version of "Tivo for the Internet" for years now, it's called Poopli. Single client-client, but lets ReplayTV owners transfers shows and clips across the Internet. No DRM, no problems. You can also transfer shows to any Java-enabled machine running DVArchive for viewing, storage, or burning.
There's a Tivo HMO plugin for Media Center. You can even access your SmartLists and radio stations through any connected Tivo. Now, if they could only do one for ReplayTV I'd be a lot happier!
ReplayTV already has a "Tivo for the Internet", it's called Poopli. Single client-client, but lets ReplayTV owners transfers shows and clips across the Internet. No DRM, no problems. You can also transfer shows to any Java-enabled machine running DVArchive for viewing, storage, or burning.
Isn't this just the natural order of things? If you're not "strong" enough to adapt and survive, well, you will die off. Sounds horrible, but if you look at it from the bigger picture of man kind, this is how man is evolving.
No, that's animals. Raw, basic natural selection is what you are describing. And in any case, it is not always true that descent through modification selects through greatest competition - there are many examples of symbiosis and altruism proving beneficial.
But classic natural selection does not apply to homo sapiens, and has not for a long time. You see, we invented Culture, and the fact that successful human societies care for their sick, their old, their enfeebled, and their disadvantages is why we have risen to the top of the food chain.
Iriver is as good as Archos when it comes to support for rockbox.
You know Rockbox happened on Archos because the quality of the Archos firmware and the frequency of updates were so terrible? Rockbox is a guerilla project and has nothing to do with the corporations that manufacture the hardware.
love for open systems and rebellian against tyranny semms to be innate in me.
I see. That's why you had to wait for iRiver to add video support to your player, presumably in response to Apple upping the ante. That's not freedom, that's market competition. Unless you and I have different definitions of open systems. Or did I miss that day when iRiver went open-source?
You want freedom, try the really free open-source Rockbox. They even managed to add 30fps video playback to some of the 4-year-old Archos Jukeboxes, along with talking menu prompts, user bookmarking, and other goodies. And lucky for you, there's moves afoot to port the Rockbox code to at least some of the iRiver devices.
Good luck. You'll have to check the specs from PortalPlayer and whichever DAC you're using for analog output, and even then there's a fudge factor based on Apple's alterations to their spec design.
Apple has used a variety of Wolfson DACs with nominal SNRs ranging from 90dB to 100dB. There are significant differences in audio quality between some of the iPod generations and models.
Not Apple, but nobody publishes SNR, THD, etc for lossy codecs.
Let's take the codecs out of the equation and assume we are playing back lossless. I'd like to know about the SNR/THD of the iPod hardware. Do you know where to find this sort of info?
The iPod's excellent onboard CPU processing and its excellent controls make it the best-sounding... of the portable music players.
Where is your justification for this? I notice Apple is very loathe to publish its Signal-to-Noise dB figures for its products.
Personally for best sound when I want a quick blast I like to jack an optical out straight into the nearest amp. iPod lacks this. It's analog output by comparison sounds a bit muddy.
Apple got to the market first and successfully staked out a huge marketshare.
In fact Apple was quite late to market, basically a year behind Creative and Archos for the HD models, and fully two years behind the Compaq/HanGo PJB. Market shares have a weird way of looking huge at the time... until a new entrant carves out a space and/or expands the space. Just as Apple did with the iPod.
The real threat to Apple's continued success is mobile phones. There are already models launched that contain hard drives and play mp3s. Within a few years it will be tough to buy a phone that does *not* bundle this, or lots of RAM or slots for Flash.
Compared with the annual sales of mobile phones, the total sales of mp3 players, iPods included, are a rounding error. The phone makers can even combine with the phone companies to basically give away the devices on long-term credit contracts.
To take just one example, in a few years, when everyone and their dog can get the space equivalent of the iPod Mini in their latest phone for "no money down", what do you think that will do to sales of the iPod Mini? Just as Tivo is being squeezed out by the cable companies, so too Apple could be squeezed out by the phone companies.
Apple didn't dominate the PC market as it does in HD-based players today. It had good marketshare, but not overwhelming.
You know at the start of the 1980s Apple's share of what was then known as the "Microcomputer Market" was nearly total - I'd say around 80% or so. Apple enjoyed almost complete dominance. For all intents and purposes Apple *was* the micro computer industry. Apple was even cocky enough to run jokey adverts welcoming IBM's entry into the marketplace.
Nobody's laughing now. Apple's share of the computer market has progressively shrunk until it is now being eclipsed in market share by third-rung Korean or Taiwanese companies few people could put a name to.
You know Creative used to have a virtual monopoly on ugly pimpified mp3 players. For years iPod fashionistas were able to hew to the purity of the white form. Endless tedious column inches were spewed in blogs and media about the flawless design purity of the iPod. They were, of course, ignoring the popularity of variously coloured covers and after-market skins for the iPod. And the iPod's slow drift into chromism...
Then came the first rift in the iPod's White Power Ideology: the iPod Mini. Suddenly it was available in, let's face it, some pretty girly pastels and the Cult of iPod had to adapt to pay homage to this new reality.
But now there's the U2 iPod. Black and Red. A testament to gaudy ugliness. It's like the A-Team Van was recycled with go-faster stripes. It out-blacks the iRivers and out-pimps the Creatives. Apple has definitely made a land grab for the ugly mp3 territory. Creative can no longer claim the Ugly Throne.
Well done. I hope the iPod Flash comes in hot pink.
You know up till quite recently Apple was all about saying over and over "Flash Sucks". Jobs made a point of dissing the Flash players during the interviews around the iPod Mini launch, even toting them on stage like trophies. And of course all the loyal Apple Maniacs went around repeating his NO FLASH mantra as if it were natural law.
I notice recently the anti-Flash hype within Apple has settled down to imperceptible...
The biggest argument made is that disk is cheaper for lots of storage. Well Flash is definitely not cheaper, but it does offer a different kind of convenience.
Say Apple sold a Flash player for $100 with minimal memory bundled but with an SD/CF slot.
Now, you can buy 1GB CF cards for arounnd $50 these days, and 1GB SD cards for around $60. And I've seen them go for $40 after rebate. Afvter rebate prices basically presage the sticker price in 4 months time...
So if you sell $100 iPods to "kids" or people who don't want to plunk down a larger bag of cash at once, then you can lock them in by selling them an "upgrade" 1GB (or the forthcoming 2Gb cards) for around $50 every few months.
Carrying around several SD cards is no big deal, they are tiny. You can get a caddy that holds 10Gb and is smaller than the end of your thumb.
Organizing different artists or genres on different cards also offers an easy, physical way for people to manage their collections without resorting to extreme tagging and playlist noodling.
One advantage of the Flash media model is also that the price of "upgrades" basically halves every 9 months or so. So if you don't want to add 5GB now, you can settle for adding only 1GB, knowing that in a year's time you could spend the same amount of money for another 2GB.
Consider also the possible business advantages of selling these low-end cards for Apple. The selling price of the cards could be subsidized by including bundled songs for a fee - a great way for record companies to distribute new music gratis. Or snippets of songs as adverts, jungles, or ringtones. This could lower the retail price of an Apple-branded "media card" by 10-20%.
Yes, even given the continued growth in capacity of flash media, they will never equal the price or capacity of hard disk media. However, at what point does enough space become too much? Lots of people seem to be happy with their iPod Minis, and they have a tiny capacity compared to some other options available.
It seems like lots of people are happy with just a few GB of music "on-hand" at any time. Hell, people get by with 256MB players! When and if Flash capacities reach the 4GB mark for $50 (I give it two years tops) then wouldn't a lot of the people who currently buy iPod Minis also consider a similar, half-priced iPod Flash?
That's a big market opportunity any way you slice it.
Of course, to really slim down Apple will have to do something about the iconic wheel interface. It's a nice design but it does take up a lot of front space on the device and constrains the screen size. Look at the iPod Photo - it's screen is lame and tiny ans resembles the old Archos Muldimedia players from a few years ago. At that time everyone lambasted them for releasing a "multimedia" player with such ridiculously tiny screens.
But Archos was just not thinking far ahead and went with maintaining their familiar audio jukebox interface. They learned from their mistake and upped the screen size on the newer models to take up most of the front panel.
What is the option for Apple? If they want to keep the wheel but shrinkthe devices *and* make the screen larger then they have to either A) put the wheel on the backside of the device, trusting users to navigate by touch, or B) convert the wheel into a software-simulation using on-screen display.
Apple has invested a lot of marketing collateral in their wheel design but it does constrain their effectiveness going forwward in a shrink of the iPod form factor for Flash sizes, especially for Asian markets where smaller is definitely much much better!
Even if we leave the style, appeal, looks, etc. aside, itunes is still a far more superior software for music management then anything else available in the market
Everyone thinks *their* favourite piece of software is the dogs bollocks. I submit that Media Center is far superior in every way to iTunes. YMMV. I note also your comment about managing mp3 players with different software suites. Ever hear of plugins? I've seen Archos players managed with iTunes, and iPods managed with Media Center. Whatever rocks your boat.
Foobar lets user deal with the (hard) clipping, either through limiter (soft clips) or something like Replaygain [replaygain.org]. Another thing is the common sample rate conversion (44.1k->48k) problem with bad resamplers from AC97 soundcards (AC97 does everything is 48k, most music [CDs] are 44.1k), custom SRC was one of the first things in foobar. They also got things like kernel streaming (as oppose to DirectSound) if your a stickler on bitwise perfect output.
Good control over the playback is of course essential. Media Center is another program that lets you fine-tune the playback options. You can use ASIO playback (to as many different zones as you have ASIO outputs), tweak the playback precision (8, 16, 24, or 32 bit), the channels (source, or map to 1,2,5 or 6 channels), and the sample rate (from 44.1KHz right up to 192KHz). There's also automatic or user-mapped ReplayGain.
I don't care if it was around several years before iTunes, but it obviously wasn't using iTune's interface before iTunes came up with it
So let's see, you admit you are completely ignorant concerning the history and evolution of a piece of software you nonetheless deign to comment upon. Interesting.
Why not take a look at Media Jukebox versions 1-5, released many years before iTunes. Then take a look at the literally hundreds of Mini and Maxi mode skins for Media Center. I also think you're ignoring the fact that MC works in multiple interface modalities: maxi, mini, theatre. Many of the skins do implement a classic three-pane action-modal maxi interface, which is also the design that iTunes has tended to use in its various incarnations and which was common by 1999. But some of the skins are insanely non-Euclidean weirdnesses,
I think what you're seeing instead is a case of parallel evolution. Take a look at an ichthyosaur sometime, then compare it to a dolphin, and tell me who "copied" whom.
Yes, the lack of built-in global hotkeys has been mentioned many times by users as sorely lacking for novice users. For further info, just type "hotkeys" in here.
There are a few solutions that probably illustrate why the developers have not bothered to date implementing a global hotkey support for menu items. The first is that MC users tend to be a crafty lot and many have already linked MC with girder and their existing universal home theatre remotes or AirPanels. The other is that MC can be driven using the command line, so many people map their function and macro keys to some of MC's command line parameters, along the lines of
You can even get one of those blank UI templates with lots of buttons and make yourself your own on-screen widget to control the program this way. Some people use their PDAs, or Bluetooth phones for this.
How can you be a succesful product manager if you're not aware of what the competition is doing? I can't believe this guy is in the position he's in with statements like that, much less keeping that position after such an admission.
Obviously you haven't met a representative sample of product managers. In my experience blanket ignorance is far more distressingly common in these types than broad-spectrum knowledge.
All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...
You probably should try Media Center - it plays everything, audio and video. The developers' slogan is "All Media, One Interface". It supports over 80 formats, does ASIO playback, and has a scripting engine that can drive any unsupported formats using their player's API. It can also transcode between formats on-the-fly while serving clients, as well as doing bitrate downsampling and soundstage upsampling. More info. Windows only though, I am afraid, although it has been embedded in several home theatre and media playback set top boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week that report came out showing about 6% of iPod users had switched from PCs to Macs and that another 7% plan on buying a Mac.
The margin of error in that survey was larger than either of those reported percentages. Therefore the reported "news" was worthless. If you look at Apple's figures you see all their dollar revenue increase comes from iPod sales while Mac sales are flat on the high-end and actually down on the low end. If there was a "halo" effect then it exists in the mind of analysts and Steve Jobs and is not being reflected in the harsh truth of revenues.
Furthermore, no figure was given or elicited for the percentage of PC users who had switched from using Macs.
Why didn't Mozilla's text search function work?
Although I've never actually used TiVo I think the basic premise is the same, record the shows you want automatically and watch them whenever you have time.
It would be except that Tivo is burdened with nasty DRM that prevents Internet-wide show sharing, transfer to non-authorized machines, and so on. Tivo has even recently agreed to implement content-owner usage flags for recorded content - meaning that the content people will be able to delete shows based on their age or number of times viewed.
ReplayTV has done a much better version of "Tivo for the Internet" for years now, it's called Poopli. Single client-client, but lets ReplayTV owners transfers shows and clips across the Internet. No DRM, no problems. You can also transfer shows to any Java-enabled machine running DVArchive for viewing, storage, or burning.
A TiVo plugin for iTunes would be nice, though!
There's a Tivo HMO plugin for Media Center. You can even access your SmartLists and radio stations through any connected Tivo. Now, if they could only do one for ReplayTV I'd be a lot happier!
ReplayTV already has a "Tivo for the Internet", it's called Poopli. Single client-client, but lets ReplayTV owners transfers shows and clips across the Internet. No DRM, no problems. You can also transfer shows to any Java-enabled machine running DVArchive for viewing, storage, or burning.
Isn't this just the natural order of things? If you're not "strong" enough to adapt and survive, well, you will die off. Sounds horrible, but if you look at it from the bigger picture of man kind, this is how man is evolving.
No, that's animals. Raw, basic natural selection is what you are describing. And in any case, it is not always true that descent through modification selects through greatest competition - there are many examples of symbiosis and altruism proving beneficial.
But classic natural selection does not apply to homo sapiens, and has not for a long time. You see, we invented Culture, and the fact that successful human societies care for their sick, their old, their enfeebled, and their disadvantages is why we have risen to the top of the food chain.
what happens when I can support 1000 machines at a time on my own
Those 1000 machines will be in your shoe.
I'll take the rack, thanks.
But think of your power bill!
Anyone have any links to articles that might have a more broad history of the MP3 player in general?
Try this:
http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/
Iriver is as good as Archos when it comes to support for rockbox.
You know Rockbox happened on Archos because the quality of the Archos firmware and the frequency of updates were so terrible? Rockbox is a guerilla project and has nothing to do with the corporations that manufacture the hardware.
love for open systems and rebellian against tyranny semms to be innate in me.
I see. That's why you had to wait for iRiver to add video support to your player, presumably in response to Apple upping the ante. That's not freedom, that's market competition. Unless you and I have different definitions of open systems. Or did I miss that day when iRiver went open-source?
You want freedom, try the really free open-source Rockbox. They even managed to add 30fps video playback to some of the 4-year-old Archos Jukeboxes, along with talking menu prompts, user bookmarking, and other goodies. And lucky for you, there's moves afoot to port the Rockbox code to at least some of the iRiver devices.
It's possible to find.
Good luck. You'll have to check the specs from PortalPlayer and whichever DAC you're using for analog output, and even then there's a fudge factor based on Apple's alterations to their spec design.
The new Zen is, apparently Signal-to-Noise Ratio : up to 97dB, # Channel Separation : up to 74dB, Frequency Response : 20Hz - 20kHz, Harmonic Distortion Output : less than 0.1%. The older Zen did SNR up to 98dB.
Apple has used a variety of Wolfson DACs with nominal SNRs ranging from 90dB to 100dB. There are significant differences in audio quality between some of the iPod generations and models.
Not Apple, but nobody publishes SNR, THD, etc for lossy codecs.
Let's take the codecs out of the equation and assume we are playing back lossless. I'd like to know about the SNR/THD of the iPod hardware. Do you know where to find this sort of info?
The iPod's excellent onboard CPU processing and its excellent controls make it the best-sounding ... of the portable music players.
Where is your justification for this? I notice Apple is very loathe to publish its Signal-to-Noise dB figures for its products.
Personally for best sound when I want a quick blast I like to jack an optical out straight into the nearest amp. iPod lacks this. It's analog output by comparison sounds a bit muddy.
Apple got to the market first and successfully staked out a huge marketshare.
In fact Apple was quite late to market, basically a year behind Creative and Archos for the HD models, and fully two years behind the Compaq/HanGo PJB. Market shares have a weird way of looking huge at the time... until a new entrant carves out a space and/or expands the space. Just as Apple did with the iPod.
The real threat to Apple's continued success is mobile phones. There are already models launched that contain hard drives and play mp3s. Within a few years it will be tough to buy a phone that does *not* bundle this, or lots of RAM or slots for Flash.
Compared with the annual sales of mobile phones, the total sales of mp3 players, iPods included, are a rounding error. The phone makers can even combine with the phone companies to basically give away the devices on long-term credit contracts.
To take just one example, in a few years, when everyone and their dog can get the space equivalent of the iPod Mini in their latest phone for "no money down", what do you think that will do to sales of the iPod Mini? Just as Tivo is being squeezed out by the cable companies, so too Apple could be squeezed out by the phone companies.
Apple didn't dominate the PC market as it does in HD-based players today. It had good marketshare, but not overwhelming.
You know at the start of the 1980s Apple's share of what was then known as the "Microcomputer Market" was nearly total - I'd say around 80% or so. Apple enjoyed almost complete dominance. For all intents and purposes Apple *was* the micro computer industry. Apple was even cocky enough to run jokey adverts welcoming IBM's entry into the marketplace.
Nobody's laughing now. Apple's share of the computer market has progressively shrunk until it is now being eclipsed in market share by third-rung Korean or Taiwanese companies few people could put a name to.
is there a way, or am I relegated to getting another Zen?
Rockbox does user-defined bookmarks. For Archos, now being ported to iRiver.
You know Creative used to have a virtual monopoly on ugly pimpified mp3 players. For years iPod fashionistas were able to hew to the purity of the white form. Endless tedious column inches were spewed in blogs and media about the flawless design purity of the iPod. They were, of course, ignoring the popularity of variously coloured covers and after-market skins for the iPod. And the iPod's slow drift into chromism...
Then came the first rift in the iPod's White Power Ideology: the iPod Mini. Suddenly it was available in, let's face it, some pretty girly pastels and the Cult of iPod had to adapt to pay homage to this new reality.
But now there's the U2 iPod. Black and Red. A testament to gaudy ugliness. It's like the A-Team Van was recycled with go-faster stripes. It out-blacks the iRivers and out-pimps the Creatives. Apple has definitely made a land grab for the ugly mp3 territory. Creative can no longer claim the Ugly Throne.
Well done. I hope the iPod Flash comes in hot pink.
You know up till quite recently Apple was all about saying over and over "Flash Sucks". Jobs made a point of dissing the Flash players during the interviews around the iPod Mini launch, even toting them on stage like trophies. And of course all the loyal Apple Maniacs went around repeating his NO FLASH mantra as if it were natural law.
I notice recently the anti-Flash hype within Apple has settled down to imperceptible...
The biggest argument made is that disk is cheaper for lots of storage. Well Flash is definitely not cheaper, but it does offer a different kind of convenience.
Say Apple sold a Flash player for $100 with minimal memory bundled but with an SD/CF slot.
Now, you can buy 1GB CF cards for arounnd $50 these days, and 1GB SD cards for around $60. And I've seen them go for $40 after rebate. Afvter rebate prices basically presage the sticker price in 4 months time...
So if you sell $100 iPods to "kids" or people who don't want to plunk down a larger bag of cash at once, then you can lock them in by selling them an "upgrade" 1GB (or the forthcoming 2Gb cards) for around $50 every few months.
Carrying around several SD cards is no big deal, they are tiny. You can get a caddy that holds 10Gb and is smaller than the end of your thumb.
Organizing different artists or genres on different cards also offers an easy, physical way for people to manage their collections without resorting to extreme tagging and playlist noodling.
One advantage of the Flash media model is also that the price of "upgrades" basically halves every 9 months or so. So if you don't want to add 5GB now, you can settle for adding only 1GB, knowing that in a year's time you could spend the same amount of money for another 2GB.
Consider also the possible business advantages of selling these low-end cards for Apple. The selling price of the cards could be subsidized by including bundled songs for a fee - a great way for record companies to distribute new music gratis. Or snippets of songs as adverts, jungles, or ringtones. This could lower the retail price of an Apple-branded "media card" by 10-20%.
Yes, even given the continued growth in capacity of flash media, they will never equal the price or capacity of hard disk media. However, at what point does enough space become too much? Lots of people seem to be happy with their iPod Minis, and they have a tiny capacity compared to some other options available.
It seems like lots of people are happy with just a few GB of music "on-hand" at any time. Hell, people get by with 256MB players! When and if Flash capacities reach the 4GB mark for $50 (I give it two years tops) then wouldn't a lot of the people who currently buy iPod Minis also consider a similar, half-priced iPod Flash?
That's a big market opportunity any way you slice it.
Of course, to really slim down Apple will have to do something about the iconic wheel interface. It's a nice design but it does take up a lot of front space on the device and constrains the screen size. Look at the iPod Photo - it's screen is lame and tiny ans resembles the old Archos Muldimedia players from a few years ago. At that time everyone lambasted them for releasing a "multimedia" player with such ridiculously tiny screens.
But Archos was just not thinking far ahead and went with maintaining their familiar audio jukebox interface. They learned from their mistake and upped the screen size on the newer models to take up most of the front panel.
What is the option for Apple? If they want to keep the wheel but shrinkthe devices *and* make the screen larger then they have to either A) put the wheel on the backside of the device, trusting users to navigate by touch, or B) convert the wheel into a software-simulation using on-screen display.
Apple has invested a lot of marketing collateral in their wheel design but it does constrain their effectiveness going forwward in a shrink of the iPod form factor for Flash sizes, especially for Asian markets where smaller is definitely much much better!
Even if we leave the style, appeal, looks, etc. aside, itunes is still a far more superior software for music management then anything else available in the market
Everyone thinks *their* favourite piece of software is the dogs bollocks. I submit that Media Center is far superior in every way to iTunes. YMMV. I note also your comment about managing mp3 players with different software suites. Ever hear of plugins? I've seen Archos players managed with iTunes, and iPods managed with Media Center. Whatever rocks your boat.
Foobar lets user deal with the (hard) clipping, either through limiter (soft clips) or something like Replaygain [replaygain.org]. Another thing is the common sample rate conversion (44.1k->48k) problem with bad resamplers from AC97 soundcards (AC97 does everything is 48k, most music [CDs] are 44.1k), custom SRC was one of the first things in foobar. They also got things like kernel streaming (as oppose to DirectSound) if your a stickler on bitwise perfect output.
Good control over the playback is of course essential. Media Center is another program that lets you fine-tune the playback options. You can use ASIO playback (to as many different zones as you have ASIO outputs), tweak the playback precision (8, 16, 24, or 32 bit), the channels (source, or map to 1,2,5 or 6 channels), and the sample rate (from 44.1KHz right up to 192KHz). There's also automatic or user-mapped ReplayGain.
iTunes (in both Mac and PC) cound't recognize my mp3 Tags in Big5 code.
Media Center supports Unicode ID3V2 tags, and it streams over LANs *and* WANs, no problem. Just FYI.
I don't care if it was around several years before iTunes, but it obviously wasn't using iTune's interface before iTunes came up with it
So let's see, you admit you are completely ignorant concerning the history and evolution of a piece of software you nonetheless deign to comment upon. Interesting.
Why not take a look at Media Jukebox versions 1-5, released many years before iTunes. Then take a look at the literally hundreds of Mini and Maxi mode skins for Media Center. I also think you're ignoring the fact that MC works in multiple interface modalities: maxi, mini, theatre. Many of the skins do implement a classic three-pane action-modal maxi interface, which is also the design that iTunes has tended to use in its various incarnations and which was common by 1999. But some of the skins are insanely non-Euclidean weirdnesses,
I think what you're seeing instead is a case of parallel evolution. Take a look at an ichthyosaur sometime, then compare it to a dolphin, and tell me who "copied" whom.
Yes, the lack of built-in global hotkeys has been mentioned many times by users as sorely lacking for novice users. For further info, just type "hotkeys" in here.
/Command Pause
/PLAY TREEPATH=Playlists\Top Hits
There are a few solutions that probably illustrate why the developers have not bothered to date implementing a global hotkey support for menu items. The first is that MC users tend to be a crafty lot and many have already linked MC with girder and their existing universal home theatre remotes or AirPanels. The other is that MC can be driven using the command line, so many people map their function and macro keys to some of MC's command line parameters, along the lines of
C:\WINNT\system32\mjextman.exe
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\mjextman.exe
etc etc.
You can even get one of those blank UI templates with lots of buttons and make yourself your own on-screen widget to control the program this way. Some people use their PDAs, or Bluetooth phones for this.
How can you be a succesful product manager if you're not aware of what the competition is doing? I can't believe this guy is in the position he's in with statements like that, much less keeping that position after such an admission.
Obviously you haven't met a representative sample of product managers. In my experience blanket ignorance is far more distressingly common in these types than broad-spectrum knowledge.
All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...
You probably should try Media Center - it plays everything, audio and video. The developers' slogan is "All Media, One Interface". It supports over 80 formats, does ASIO playback, and has a scripting engine that can drive any unsupported formats using their player's API. It can also transcode between formats on-the-fly while serving clients, as well as doing bitrate downsampling and soundstage upsampling. More info. Windows only though, I am afraid, although it has been embedded in several home theatre and media playback set top boxes.