"iTunes will fail!" Michael Robertson MP3tunes.com

Q: That's the Sony way.
Yeah the Sony way, and you see what happens. If you're lucky and you get the mojo going, you get the Walkman, but if you're not then you fade into irrelevancy. Apple is the one big exception with their iTunes empire, but mark my words they will go down and the rest of the world will catch them and surpass them. We've seen this before. We've seen this with the original Mac, which was a superior personal computing platform. Nobody can dispute that, but it didn't win. Microsoft Windows won because Bill Gates is a genius? No, because they had all the developers.

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He is a bit outdated. He doesn't know Mp4 (AAC) is the newer version of Mp3, with better sound quality. He is still stuck in the mp3 world.

He didn't realize the circumstances of Apple, Microsoft, and the computer industry are different now.

Here is a better article:
The iTunes Monopoly/Failure Myth
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E36929A1-EA70-493B-B823-DCCEA85DAF54.html

" Apple is the one big exception with their iTunes empire, but mark my words they will go down and the rest of the world will catch them and surpass them. We've seen this before. We've seen this with the original Mac, which was a superior personal computing platform. Nobody can dispute that, but it didn't win. Microsoft Windows won because Bill Gates is a genius? No, because they had all the developers."

Not much of a prediction without some sort of time frame. More like blowing smoke than anything.

In Summary....A Windbag

eom

Microsoft Windows won because Bill Gates is a genius? No, because they had all the developers.

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Bill Gates probably is a genius. Or at least pretty smart, in his own clever little way. But "developers, developers, developers" is not why Microsoft won over Apple. Someone's drinking the Ballmer-ade... 😀

He is also assuming that Apple has not learned from any of their past mistakes. I think they have learned a great deal from the original Mac.

There's one thing about Apple using the AAC format: why is it that a lot of third-party portable music players now support the AAC format? Not to mention the fact Apple has such a huge percentage marketshare of the portable music player market that they could get away with using AAC as the primary encoding format?

SactoGuy18 said:

There's one thing about Apple using the AAC format: why is it that a lot of third-party portable music players now support the AAC format? Not to mention the fact Apple has such a huge percentage marketshare of the portable music player market that they could get away with using AAC as the primary encoding format?

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I'm first going to point out that AAC is not an Apple-created format. I get that impression from you saying "third-party portable music players." I just did a Wikipedia search and saw that Sony was part of the group that developed AAC, and Sony also uses it as the standard on the PS3, PSP and Walkman. Heck, I didn't know this until after about a year of owning an iPod.

Anywho, Apple basically took a stand on a better, newer format with the iTunes Store instead of doing the tired old deal of trying to make crap compatible for every device ever made. If you have an iPod-like device that only plays MP3 (and maybe WMA), you have a crappy player. The use of MP3 is the main problem I have with the Amazon Music Store. I buy stuff from Amazon, but usually only the heavily reduced items. AAC is better at the same bitrate, so I'm getting better quality at iTunes.

On this Robertson douche, sounds like he just wanted to be heard. Until someone makes a digital media player that is anywhere close to the iPod, creates software as easy to use as iTunes and creates a store as easy and loaded as the iTunes Store, people aren't going to switch en masse. Microsoft is going to throw up another whiff with the Zune HD when people complain about battery life, and nobody else really comes close.

Is this the same guy that thought his Lindows linux distro would take down Windows?

There is nothing to see here. Move along, move along....