Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes "Here's the secret answers that expose a series of myths concerning Microsoft's ability to own new markets, why its monopoly position won't be of any help, and why the company's consumer retail strategies aren't working."
oh please, allofmp3 is the russian mafia selling songs they have no license to sell. Of course they can make money selling stolen american pop songs for little in MP3 format - anything they make is pure profit. You might as well say the best place to buy any electronics is out of the back of a truck on a dark corner.
Emusic and mp3.com sell music from groups that haven't signed away their work for a blockbuster promotion campaign. Unfortunately, most musicians have, are need to if they plan to make a real career.
Most of the revenues from iTunes currently just goes to labels, but it opens up the potential for direct sales that benefits artists more. And in fact, CD Baby is already in iTunes doing that.
How Original Content Will Change Entertainment"Steve Jobs has connections in music, movies, and TV - how long before Apple begins commissioning original programming? Here's a look at the music, movie and TV business, and why Apple's involvement in each is far larger than the mainstream media seems to understand."
The firmware update Apple just released at the arrival of the 5G+ also extended the battery life of the original (last years) 5G iPod, so they both have the improved video batter playback. It also enabled most of the other features, including an alpha letter that displays when you spin through file names so you can see where you are withing the 1000's of songs. It didn't provide the new searching feature though.
Actually the classical definition of marketing is "the action or business of promoting and selling products or services"
Microsoft is a great promoter and seller, but rarely do they offer the best product in a class. When they do, it's usually because they've repressed any competition and there are no alternatives left. In other cases, they spend a lot of money building a solution for a market that doesn't matter: WinCE and WMA are two good examples. Lots of development and refinements in order to deliver PDAs and DRM - the two products that nobody really wants to pay for.
A compairson of how Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are fighting to shove ads at users, and why adware strategies are eating away at Microsoft's ability to support and extend their desktop and remain competitive.
"Microsoft's insatiable greed has resulted in a poorly designed software platform, rushed to market in order to kill emerging competition. Architectural flaws have resulted in a security crisis for users, which has resulted in an unsupportable mess for Microsoft. Rather than working pointedly to solve their flaws and the resulting platform crisis, Microsoft as a company has chased after adware revenue, and has exposed users to further grief by being part of the adware problem rather than its solution."
People think of the YouTube name first in video. How many people even realize Google is a source for video? I didn't realize it, but Google is hosting the national archives, and has a variety of other 'serious' content up.
If Google did buy out YouTube, it could simply rebrand its Google Video site with YouTube icons and the MySpace kids wouldn't even notice.
Google faces significant risks from rushing in behind YT, because Google has money and is eminently suable. They can't afford to simply let copywrite material fly, because the studios will attack them just as newspapers and book publishers already have.
A RoughlyDrafted Magazine article looking at Apple's iTV, and why Apple is in deals with Google, explains more about why YouTube is such a mess and why big pockets will just make that mess more problematic:
The following article is getting high ratings as well, on how Apple is positioning the iTV as an extension of the iPod platform in casual gaming, living room Widgets, and interactive content, with a history on how Apple dropped the ball with HyperCard, how the web took over, and why Apple has something new to offer today :
All "Defective" is doing is defacing city property around Apple Stores. While a few people might give a shit what a handful of communists think, it's worthless to make your case by slapping stickers all over town. Because it's not Apple that has to peel all those stickers off.
Thanks for defacing our town with your stickers
on
The Day Against DRM
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· Score: 1
As I got to work today on the subway, I saw city workers scraping blue Defective stickers off city street poles near the Apple store.
What an effective message. Thanks for coming to our city to vandalize. Next time, stay home in your basement and listen to your Ogg.
Nobody cares about your anti-DRM bullshit.
Fumes from burning plastics don't come from the flame redardants, they come from the plastics. Most plastics emit toxic fumes when burned.
Traces of a NON REGULATED fire retardant CONSIDERED SAFE by the WHO (and the EU and the EPA) is all Greenpeace could find in the Mac Book Pro, so they spun a tale about how this TBBPA was a toxic chemical (is isn't) that is potentially killing babies (it isn't) when in reality, it saves lives by retarding plastics from burning and allowing an extra chance for babies to survive being taken out of a burning building before the toxic chemicals are released. Greenpeace lied to create sensationalist panic.
The flames of fires don't kill as fast as the toxic smoke. Pretty much everything on fire creates toxic fumes. That's why flame retardants are required by law to limit the damage of toxic fumes as much as possible. Obviously one shouldn't roll up their laptop and smoke it, but in a house fire, a new laptop is far less toxic than an old TV on fire.
Greenpeace doesn't give a fuck about the environment or fire safety or any other facts, they just want to create panic that generates donations. They are total frauds and lie incessantly.
they either park a domain close to something else (slasshdot.org) or with a bunch of crap content copied and pasted from various sites, and hope the search engines think its actual content.
Then, as people arrive either on accident or through the incompetence of the search engines, people looking to buy stuff either click on ads or (more likely and more profitably) click on google search rank, and find stuff to buy.
This creates value for advertisers (because morons eventually click and buy), so money trickles down to the parked spam page maintainers.
Google + all are making money via providing a web of spam and increasingly worthless search results. The big question is: how long can Google afford to crap where it eats?
Well if you look at the result, IE support for the Mac and Unix was as comprehensive and functional as POSIX support in NT.
Everything about IE was designed to kill Netscape. If IE were Windows only, then Netscape could have gained a stronger foundation as the only browsers for Unix and Mac users, which would have isolated IE. By pretending to compete with Netscape cross platform, they could then drop their cross platform browsers as soon as Netscape had been destroyed. Which they did, if you recall.
Microsoft failed to do the same thing with QuickTime, and it came back to haut them: they gave up on making WMA fully cross platform (after promising such for the Mac), and left QuickTime to develop on the Mac. That gave Apple a mature media platform to counter WMA with the iPod/iTunes/Fairplay, and Apple used it to totally destroy WMA.
Are you too young to remember that Netscape claimed the web platform would make Windows irrelevant?
Microsoft wanted to destroy Netscape on the browser end to make sure most web apps were tied to Windows, while also trying to fight with Netscape over web server software.
Netscape was a competitor as a server software vendor AND as a rival platform.
This is pretty absurd. The market for 10.4 Tiger is pretty much done, because anyone who wanted to upgrade to to Tiger did so last year.
Anyone buying a Mac in the last year and a half got Tiger for 'free.' So who is left to buy a Tiger upgrade? If they waited this long, why buy it now rather than waiting for Leopard in a few months?
Statistics are worthless if they are presented by idiots who don't even know what the numbers mean.
Apple keeps prices low because they want sources of content for iPod players.
Apple doesn't care if you fill up your iPod with CDs or even recordings you made yourself; they just want to sell iPods. That allows them to run the iTunes Store without a profit. They do profit some, and they obviously profit indirectly in many other ways, but they don't HAVE to profit. Apple worked to build support for podcasting, which makes them nothing - but gives iPods something to do, and users a reason to buy them.
That's different than anyone else. Microsoft & its WMA partners expected stores to make significant money. Why would MTV Urge care about enriching WMA hardware partners who don't share the wealth? It's a model that works very differently - or actually doesn't work at all. Without functional stores, there is not enough WMA content for WMA players to matter, particularly compared to iTunes.
It's all part of Apple's interconnected strategy for the iPod, which is connecting media downloads, wireless, and gaming into a mesh of markets that work to feed demand for each other. Whether you like Apple or not, its a good example of how to deliver a commercial product: grow it slowly, don't try to profit at every angle, and build for a future platform, rather than instant profits. Ironically, many of Apple's strategies are ones Microsoft used in building its own Windows platform.
So I can't really imagine that anyone is going to actually use the Zune, but what about Apple, and in particular the Airport Express and the Airport AV (aka iTV)?
Both use enryption to tunnel your tunes (and soon your videos) to another basestation. Will Creative Commons be pissed off that their content is protected as it travels throught users' homes?
What about VPN? Will Creative Commons be upset to find that nobody can copy their stuff as it scatters through the tubes of the Interweb in a bunch of encrypted chunks that are entirely impossible to reuse and adapt, from a client to their workplace?
And of course, What about Bob? And think of the children, etc.
RoughlyDrafted presents a closer look at Apple's announced iTV set top box, why it isn't ready yet, how it differs from existing products already on the market, and how it fits in with the company's online media strategy:
While the Greenpeace "Guide to Greener Electronics" was swallowed whole by the media, it is actually a sham report with little factual basis. In reality, it presents rankings upside down: Lenovo's higher quality business products are more likely to get recycled (and simply last longer), but because the company didn't have a lot of PR about it on their website, they were ranked last. The report also targeted Apple (3rd from the bottom), just months after Apple was recognized by the Sierra Club in its top ten list of Green companies.
However, Greenpeace cheers for HP and Dell, who generate far more e-waste than any other PC makers. They churn out disposable, cheap PCs with short life spans, often using far more toxic CRT displays to hit the low price target. HP was rated good on "Chemical Management," despite missing their goals last year. Meanwhile, Apple was rated "partially bad" for not having as many published goals, when in reality they had already banned use of those toxics, including Hexavalent Chromium and others.
It's really too bad the Greenpeace report was thrown around without any criticism from the mainstream media or even from bloggers. Even Slashdot refused to cover it. Everyone is afraid to say anything about Greenpeace, but ignoring their misleading and irresponsible report on the grounds that it's politically incorrect to critique anything calling itself "Green," actually waters down the efforts of real environmentalists and those interested in forwarding the state of the art in clean and responsible business and manufacturing.
Incidentally, the Greenpeace report was written by a SVTC member. That's the group that targeted Apple last year in a campaign against the iPod, saying that people would throw their iPods away when the battery ran down. More about the Toxic Trash campaign on Apple.
Examine the facts behind the Greenpeace report
on
Rethinking the Thinkpad
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· Score: 2, Informative
While the Greenpeace "Guide to Greener Electronics" was swallowed whole by the media, it is actually a sham report with little factual basis. In reality, it presents rankings upside down: Lenovo's higher quality business products are more likely to get recycled (and simply last longer), but because the company didn't have a lot of PR about it on their website, they were ranked last. The report also targeted Apple (3rd from the bottom), which is recognized by the Sierra Club in its top ten list of Green companies.
However, Greenpeace cheers for HP and Dell, who generate far more e-waste than any other PC makers. They churn out disposable, cheap PCs with short life spans, often using far more toxic CRT displays to hit the low price target. HP was rated good on "Chemical Management," despite missing their goals last year. Meanwhile, Apple was rated "partially bad" for not having as many published goals, when in reality they had already banned use of those toxics, including Hexavalent Chromium and others.
It's really too bad the Greenpeace report was thrown around without any criticism from the mainstream media or even from bloggers. Even Slashdot refused to cover it. Everyone is afraid to say anything about Greenpeace, but ignoring their misleading and irresponsible report on the grounds that it's politically incorrect to critique anything calling itself "Green," actually waters down the efforts of real environmentalists and those interested in forwarding the state of the art in clean and responsible business and manufacturing.
Incidentally, the Greenpeace report was written by a SVTC member. That's the group that targeted Apple last year in a campaign against the iPod, saying that people would throw their iPods away when the battery ran down. More about the Toxic Trash campaign on Apple
Microsoft does plan a Service Pack 3 for XP, which is suposed to be released around the time of Vista. However, SP's are bug fixes & minor updates (similar to Apple's 10.4.n releases). As such, they don't really pose the problem.
XP isn't difficult to emulate as an "API" because Microsoft is doing updates, but rather because XP is a huge, monolithic, closed uber platform that even Microsoft has lots of trouble updating in a way that does not break somebody's existing code.
Clearly you didn't read about why copy paste development is a fanciful notion in the minds of tech writers with no experience in development or project management. Cringely is fine as a an industry gossip columnist, but as an engineer, he's only as good at imagineering products as a market droid or Pointy Head Boss.
Since you don't have a grasp of the issues involved in actually pulling this off technically (one clue: WINE has been working on this for a decade), let me bypass the technical difficulty by just dropping a ton of bricks upon the supposed advantage this would have for Apple in the marketplace:
It would convert Apple from being a progressive, alternative platform into a languishing copycat of Windows.
Here's an actual rundown of why Cringely's "Red Box" or "magical transparent emulation/virtualization/compatibility layer" isn't at all practical:
Unraveling the Red Box Myth
According to proponents of the Red Box Myth, Mac OS X will supposedly soon run Windows software natively, perhaps as soon as Leopard 10.5. They're wrong; here's why.
Here's why the idea behind running various different types of software doesn't really work in the real world:
And here's an article explaining why pundits' ideas for "copying and pasting together various technologies" does not usually mean such ideas make any sense.
Unraveling The Copy/Paste Development Myth
According to proponents of this myth, complex software development is a something like making funny madlibs from refrigerator magnets. Pick out features, line them up appropriately, and voila: an operating system! They're wrong, here's why.
Slashdot Mirror
10 iPod vs Zune Myths
10 Ways Microsoft can Salvage their iPod Killer
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
"Here's the secret answers that expose a series of myths concerning Microsoft's ability to own new markets, why its monopoly position won't be of any help, and why the company's consumer retail strategies aren't working."
Emusic and mp3.com sell music from groups that haven't signed away their work for a blockbuster promotion campaign. Unfortunately, most musicians have, are need to if they plan to make a real career.
Most of the revenues from iTunes currently just goes to labels, but it opens up the potential for direct sales that benefits artists more. And in fact, CD Baby is already in iTunes doing that.
How Original Content Will Change Entertainment "Steve Jobs has connections in music, movies, and TV - how long before Apple begins commissioning original programming? Here's a look at the music, movie and TV business, and why Apple's involvement in each is far larger than the mainstream media seems to understand."
The firmware update Apple just released at the arrival of the 5G+ also extended the battery life of the original (last years) 5G iPod, so they both have the improved video batter playback. It also enabled most of the other features, including an alpha letter that displays when you spin through file names so you can see where you are withing the 1000's of songs. It didn't provide the new searching feature though.
Ugg, me fail english! That's unpossible.
You have falled for the fallacy of equal percentages.
5% of x is not equal to 5% of y
5% of the music player industry = nothing to brag about
2.2% of the world wide PC industry = $12 billion company
Thanks for playing though.
Actually the classical definition of marketing is "the action or business of promoting and selling products or services"
Microsoft is a great promoter and seller, but rarely do they offer the best product in a class. When they do, it's usually because they've repressed any competition and there are no alternatives left. In other cases, they spend a lot of money building a solution for a market that doesn't matter: WinCE and WMA are two good examples. Lots of development and refinements in order to deliver PDAs and DRM - the two products that nobody really wants to pay for.
A compairson of how Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are fighting to shove ads at users, and why adware strategies are eating away at Microsoft's ability to support and extend their desktop and remain competitive.
"Microsoft's insatiable greed has resulted in a poorly designed software platform, rushed to market in order to kill emerging competition. Architectural flaws have resulted in a security crisis for users, which has resulted in an unsupportable mess for Microsoft. Rather than working pointedly to solve their flaws and the resulting platform crisis, Microsoft as a company has chased after adware revenue, and has exposed users to further grief by being part of the adware problem rather than its solution."
If Google did buy out YouTube, it could simply rebrand its Google Video site with YouTube icons and the MySpace kids wouldn't even notice.
Google faces significant risks from rushing in behind YT, because Google has money and is eminently suable. They can't afford to simply let copywrite material fly, because the studios will attack them just as newspapers and book publishers already have.
A RoughlyDrafted Magazine article looking at Apple's iTV, and why Apple is in deals with Google, explains more about why YouTube is such a mess and why big pockets will just make that mess more problematic:
Apple's iTV and Alternative Content: the future of podcasting, porn, indie media.
The following article is getting high ratings as well, on how Apple is positioning the iTV as an extension of the iPod platform in casual gaming, living room Widgets, and interactive content, with a history on how Apple dropped the ball with HyperCard, how the web took over, and why Apple has something new to offer today :
iTV Interactive: The Apple Game Console
All "Defective" is doing is defacing city property around Apple Stores. While a few people might give a shit what a handful of communists think, it's worthless to make your case by slapping stickers all over town. Because it's not Apple that has to peel all those stickers off.
As I got to work today on the subway, I saw city workers scraping blue Defective stickers off city street poles near the Apple store. What an effective message. Thanks for coming to our city to vandalize. Next time, stay home in your basement and listen to your Ogg. Nobody cares about your anti-DRM bullshit.
In fact, it looks like MS isn't supporting much at all:
10 iPod vs Zune Myths
Traces of a NON REGULATED fire retardant CONSIDERED SAFE by the WHO (and the EU and the EPA) is all Greenpeace could find in the Mac Book Pro, so they spun a tale about how this TBBPA was a toxic chemical (is isn't) that is potentially killing babies (it isn't) when in reality, it saves lives by retarding plastics from burning and allowing an extra chance for babies to survive being taken out of a burning building before the toxic chemicals are released. Greenpeace lied to create sensationalist panic.
The flames of fires don't kill as fast as the toxic smoke. Pretty much everything on fire creates toxic fumes. That's why flame retardants are required by law to limit the damage of toxic fumes as much as possible. Obviously one shouldn't roll up their laptop and smoke it, but in a house fire, a new laptop is far less toxic than an old TV on fire.
Greenpeace doesn't give a fuck about the environment or fire safety or any other facts, they just want to create panic that generates donations. They are total frauds and lie incessantly.
Greenpeace Lies About Apple
Greenpeace Apologizes For Apple Stink
More Secrets: The Scandal of Green Computing
Top Secret: Greenpeace Report Misleading and Incompetent
they either park a domain close to something else (slasshdot.org) or with a bunch of crap content copied and pasted from various sites, and hope the search engines think its actual content.
Then, as people arrive either on accident or through the incompetence of the search engines, people looking to buy stuff either click on ads or (more likely and more profitably) click on google search rank, and find stuff to buy.
This creates value for advertisers (because morons eventually click and buy), so money trickles down to the parked spam page maintainers.
Google + all are making money via providing a web of spam and increasingly worthless search results. The big question is: how long can Google afford to crap where it eats?
Well if you look at the result, IE support for the Mac and Unix was as comprehensive and functional as POSIX support in NT.
Everything about IE was designed to kill Netscape. If IE were Windows only, then Netscape could have gained a stronger foundation as the only browsers for Unix and Mac users, which would have isolated IE. By pretending to compete with Netscape cross platform, they could then drop their cross platform browsers as soon as Netscape had been destroyed. Which they did, if you recall.
Microsoft failed to do the same thing with QuickTime, and it came back to haut them: they gave up on making WMA fully cross platform (after promising such for the Mac), and left QuickTime to develop on the Mac. That gave Apple a mature media platform to counter WMA with the iPod/iTunes/Fairplay, and Apple used it to totally destroy WMA.
Are you too young to remember that Netscape claimed the web platform would make Windows irrelevant?
Microsoft wanted to destroy Netscape on the browser end to make sure most web apps were tied to Windows, while also trying to fight with Netscape over web server software.
Netscape was a competitor as a server software vendor AND as a rival platform.
This is pretty absurd. The market for 10.4 Tiger is pretty much done, because anyone who wanted to upgrade to to Tiger did so last year.
Anyone buying a Mac in the last year and a half got Tiger for 'free.' So who is left to buy a Tiger upgrade? If they waited this long, why buy it now rather than waiting for Leopard in a few months?
Statistics are worthless if they are presented by idiots who don't even know what the numbers mean.
----
www.roughlydrafted.com
--- Greenpeace Apologizes for Apple Stink
Apple keeps prices low because they want sources of content for iPod players.
Apple doesn't care if you fill up your iPod with CDs or even recordings you made yourself; they just want to sell iPods. That allows them to run the iTunes Store without a profit. They do profit some, and they obviously profit indirectly in many other ways, but they don't HAVE to profit. Apple worked to build support for podcasting, which makes them nothing - but gives iPods something to do, and users a reason to buy them.
That's different than anyone else. Microsoft & its WMA partners expected stores to make significant money. Why would MTV Urge care about enriching WMA hardware partners who don't share the wealth? It's a model that works very differently - or actually doesn't work at all. Without functional stores, there is not enough WMA content for WMA players to matter, particularly compared to iTunes.
It's all part of Apple's interconnected strategy for the iPod, which is connecting media downloads, wireless, and gaming into a mesh of markets that work to feed demand for each other. Whether you like Apple or not, its a good example of how to deliver a commercial product: grow it slowly, don't try to profit at every angle, and build for a future platform, rather than instant profits. Ironically, many of Apple's strategies are ones Microsoft used in building its own Windows platform.
10 Ways Microsoft Can Salvage their iPod Killer
Hacking iPod Games: How Apple's DRM Works
iTV: the Killer App for Wireless N
Apple's New Dual Processor Game Console
How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works
Why Apple is Winning in Media Downloads
The Apple iTMS vs Amazon Unbox Rivalry Myth
1990-1995: The Rise of Windows
So I can't really imagine that anyone is going to actually use the Zune, but what about Apple, and in particular the Airport Express and the Airport AV (aka iTV)?
iTV: the Killer App for Wireless N
Both use enryption to tunnel your tunes (and soon your videos) to another basestation. Will Creative Commons be pissed off that their content is protected as it travels throught users' homes?
What about VPN? Will Creative Commons be upset to find that nobody can copy their stuff as it scatters through the tubes of the Interweb in a bunch of encrypted chunks that are entirely impossible to reuse and adapt, from a client to their workplace?
And of course, What about Bob? And think of the children, etc.
How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works
A Visual Comparison of CD, DVD, HD and iTMS
Why Apple is Winning in Media Downloads
The Apple iTMS vs Amazon Unbox Rivalry Myth
However, Greenpeace cheers for HP and Dell, who generate far more e-waste than any other PC makers. They churn out disposable, cheap PCs with short life spans, often using far more toxic CRT displays to hit the low price target. HP was rated good on "Chemical Management," despite missing their goals last year. Meanwhile, Apple was rated "partially bad" for not having as many published goals, when in reality they had already banned use of those toxics, including Hexavalent Chromium and others.
If you like facts, here are more examples of how the Greenpeace report was misleading and incompetent.
It's really too bad the Greenpeace report was thrown around without any criticism from the mainstream media or even from bloggers. Even Slashdot refused to cover it. Everyone is afraid to say anything about Greenpeace, but ignoring their misleading and irresponsible report on the grounds that it's politically incorrect to critique anything calling itself "Green," actually waters down the efforts of real environmentalists and those interested in forwarding the state of the art in clean and responsible business and manufacturing.
Incidentally, the Greenpeace report was written by a SVTC member. That's the group that targeted Apple last year in a campaign against the iPod, saying that people would throw their iPods away when the battery ran down. More about the Toxic Trash campaign on Apple.
However, Greenpeace cheers for HP and Dell, who generate far more e-waste than any other PC makers. They churn out disposable, cheap PCs with short life spans, often using far more toxic CRT displays to hit the low price target. HP was rated good on "Chemical Management," despite missing their goals last year. Meanwhile, Apple was rated "partially bad" for not having as many published goals, when in reality they had already banned use of those toxics, including Hexavalent Chromium and others.
If you like facts, here are more examples of how the Greenpeace report was misleading and incompetent.
It's really too bad the Greenpeace report was thrown around without any criticism from the mainstream media or even from bloggers. Even Slashdot refused to cover it. Everyone is afraid to say anything about Greenpeace, but ignoring their misleading and irresponsible report on the grounds that it's politically incorrect to critique anything calling itself "Green," actually waters down the efforts of real environmentalists and those interested in forwarding the state of the art in clean and responsible business and manufacturing.
Incidentally, the Greenpeace report was written by a SVTC member. That's the group that targeted Apple last year in a campaign against the iPod, saying that people would throw their iPods away when the battery ran down. More about the Toxic Trash campaign on Apple
Microsoft does plan a Service Pack 3 for XP, which is suposed to be released around the time of Vista. However, SP's are bug fixes & minor updates (similar to Apple's 10.4.n releases). As such, they don't really pose the problem.
XP isn't difficult to emulate as an "API" because Microsoft is doing updates, but rather because XP is a huge, monolithic, closed uber platform that even Microsoft has lots of trouble updating in a way that does not break somebody's existing code.
Clearly you didn't read about why copy paste development is a fanciful notion in the minds of tech writers with no experience in development or project management. Cringely is fine as a an industry gossip columnist, but as an engineer, he's only as good at imagineering products as a market droid or Pointy Head Boss.
Since you don't have a grasp of the issues involved in actually pulling this off technically (one clue: WINE has been working on this for a decade), let me bypass the technical difficulty by just dropping a ton of bricks upon the supposed advantage this would have for Apple in the marketplace:
It would convert Apple from being a progressive, alternative platform into a languishing copycat of Windows.
I vote no.
Well not specifically "retail," but it does not work with non-SP2, Media Center Editions, or upgrades.
It does work with corporate XP SP2 CDs, which have no register/authorization system.
Unraveling the Red Box Myth
According to proponents of the Red Box Myth, Mac OS X will supposedly soon run Windows software natively, perhaps as soon as Leopard 10.5. They're wrong; here's why.
Here's why the idea behind running various different types of software doesn't really work in the real world:
Unraveling the Utopian System that Runs All Software Imaginable Myth
The Utopian System that Runs All Software Imaginable Myth speaks of a hardware or software solution that... does it all. It seems like such a great idea, but is it?
And here's an article explaining why pundits' ideas for "copying and pasting together various technologies" does not usually mean such ideas make any sense.
Unraveling The Copy/Paste Development Myth
According to proponents of this myth, complex software development is a something like making funny madlibs from refrigerator magnets. Pick out features, line them up appropriately, and voila: an operating system! They're wrong, here's why.