Re: Re: Let me explain something
Originally posted by bertagert
I'm under the impression that a company could use AAC on their player. I'm not positive but AAC is not owned by Apple, its actually a standard from the MPEG group. So, I think it could be used on other players, the players just have to support AAC which no one does right now except for the ipod.
AAC is an open standard. AAC/p is an open standard. FairPlay (the protection provider for all iTMS songs) is NOT an open standard, last I checked, and Apple has complete control over it.
Yes, any player can implement AAC. However, not all players will be necessarily granted rights to play AAC/p[FairPlay] content.
As for the ITMS on windows. Apple does not need to bring it out so quick. Having it in a few months would be the same as bringing it out now. People are either going to use it or not. Look at all the companies that were great and now aren't so great in the P2P biz. It doesn't matter when you start, as long as you have the better product and advertise it the right way you'll get the business.
I agree. We've had more than a decade where "first to market" was the marketing slogan driving nearly all development. I think customers have grown to realize that quality is important. Think of all the "first to market" search engines out there: Google didn't really break out until 1999-2000. How often do you use AltaVista or NorthernLight these days? Yahoo! is still around (obviously), but that's mostly because it took the minor "first out" advantage and parlayed it into a much larger realm of enterprises.
On the other hand, Apple
does need to pay close attention to MusicMatch's offering, and even directly one-up it. MusicMatch got nearly everything right, from first glance. It even seems like they were able to overcome WMA's problems with regard to authorizing/deauthorizing three computers at a time. Apple, finally, has legitimate competition here, and the iTMS people will need to react to this.
I think Apple does a great job of developing software. If the windows version is as good as the mac version, everything will work out. Don't worry about a few months.
The question is whether Apple can gain sufficient mindshare. You can gain mindshare by being the only guy out there, or by having a better product than anyone else, or by sheer marketting dollars. Given that much more is at stake for Apple here than a few 99-cent track sales (ie, iPod and Mac sales and overall Apple branding), Apple certainly has more reason to put its full muscle behind iTMS than MusicMatch or BuyMusic. Dell's another story, but we'll have to judge their execution when they debut.
The question is: where does Apple push, given that the first-to-market (with a viable product) advantage is lost? Better product, or better marketing?
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