More on iPod and WMA

[CalfCanuck]

Originally posted by shamino
The reason is simple.

Microsoft has a very long history of using "embrace and extend" to take over a market and kick out competitors.

That's how they got rid of Netscape. They shipped their own browser that supported all of Netscape's features (including plugin support). Then they released their own competing tech (Active X and non-standard extensions to HTML and JavaScript). Then they modified their FrontPage package to generate web sites that would deliberately break Netscape (by producing broken HTML that IE would be able to parse anyway.) Then they deleted the Netscape-compatibility features (and did it as a part of a security update, so customers really couldn't choose to refuse it.) Then they began the ad campaigns claiming that Netscape is incompatible with popular web pages.

....

Apple knows all about Microsoft's business tactics. If Apple starts supporting WMA, then it will be the beginning of the end of Apple's entire digital music business. While this might be a valid thing to do out of desparation, it is not something you do when you are holding the largest share of the market.

Excellent post. Oh yes, Apple knows FIRST HAND.

Don't forget that they did EXACTLY the same thing with Quicktime 2.5 and 3.0 for Windows, because MS didn't want to give up control of the digital video market. It TOTALLY screwed up te entire multimedia industry in 1994-95, who only wanted to ship cross platform products.

Windows would demand your machine had the exact QT version that the CD-ROM's QT movies were made in. If they didn't match, all the user had to do was uninstall the current version of QT on their computer and install the "needed" version.🙄

Like every user would uninstall and reinstall QT versions whenever they wanted to change a CD-ROM.

Well, suddenly the the problems mysteriously disappeared, right about the time the US antitrust investigation appeared. Years later, during the trial, this QT nonsense was some of the most sorid and damning tetimony about MS. Paper and email trails galore - the technical press reporting the trial had a field day.

So while the general press made it all out to be a "browser" war (how many average users or newspaper readers even gave a rip about some crazy digital video nonsense), this QT issue went to the heart of how MS operated and probably stuck in the judge's mind as he became such an anti-MS foe.

So Apple is right back there again, with QT 6 now. Believe me, Apple understands that MS will screw them given the chance.

And don't believe I'm just some MS hating geek. I'm pretty ambivalent about them as a platform (as a developer, most of my users are based in that world). But you sure as hell wouldn't want your daughter to be marrying someone with their sense of fair-play. Neither would you want them to be in charge of your software standards if you had any say whatsoever.

 

[wombat2]

The "embrace and extend" strategy is used by most companies in most industries that hold monopolies. Perhaps it would be a problem in the future for Apple; however, I can't realistically see how. If they make their player that uses AAC but also supports WMA, then what is MS going to do to make them stop using AAC? All of the Mac users are still going to be doing AAC, so at worst, MS could make it hard for Apple to retain the Windows segment of the audience. Guess what, that's going to be difficult anyway, once there are numerous options for mp3 players and playlist managers, some of which support all of the formats while Apple supports only politically preferred formats.

As a sidenote, I was getting the impression in this thread that MSN had flopped. It didn't seem correct to me, but I didn't know enough about the numbers to debate the point. However, I checked our Web site's stats. We don't get a list of ISPs, just a list of IP addresses, and I'm not going to invest the time to translate all of those by hand. 🙂 However, we do get stats on "links from an Internet search engine".

In those numbers, Google is #1 with 32.5% of our links from Internet search engines. MSN is #2 with 24.4% of the links. Yahoo is #3 at 20.3%. AOL is #4 at 11.6%.

I do not claim that this is closely tied with market share (lots of the MSN searches happen because Internet Explorer defaults to MSN as its homepage) but it does make me think that MSN has not flopped.

Re: Xbox, I read the other day that Microsoft expects sales to reach 14 million this summer. The Xbox was released in 2001. The iPod was also released in 2001, I think. It seems I heard that about 2 million iPods have been sold. I know, different types of markets, but still.

The only true flop I can think of by Microsoft, outside of their normal business of OSes and software, is Ultimate TV.

 

[shamino]

Originally posted by wombat2
The "embrace and extend" strategy is used by most companies in most industries that hold monopolies. Perhaps it would be a problem in the future for Apple; however, I can't realistically see how. If they make their player that uses AAC but also supports WMA, then what is MS going to do to make them stop using AAC? All of the Mac users are still going to be doing AAC, so at worst, MS could make it hard for Apple to retain the Windows segment of the audience.

And therefore capture the majority of the online music business for themselves.

Apple has historically been a niche player. You're recommending policies to guarantee that this never changes.

As a sidenote, I was getting the impression in this thread that MSN had flopped. It didn't seem correct to me, but I didn't know enough about the numbers to debate the point. However, I checked our Web site's stats. We don't get a list of ISPs, just a list of IP addresses, and I'm not going to invest the time to translate all of those by hand. 🙂 However, we do get stats on "links from an Internet search engine".

In those numbers, Google is #1 with 32.5% of our links from Internet search engines. MSN is #2 with 24.4% of the links. Yahoo is #3 at 20.3%. AOL is #4 at 11.6%.

I do not claim that this is closely tied with market share (lots of the MSN searches happen because Internet Explorer defaults to MSN as its homepage) but it does make me think that MSN has not flopped.

According to Microsoft's 2002 financial analyst meeting report (sorry it's PowerPoint), AOL's market share is 35.5%, and MSN's is 7.2%. AOL's revenues are $2.7B, while MSN's is $557M.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find 2003 figures with a web search. They're probably not available to the general public at this time.

They're certainly not dying, but they're also a long way away from their claims of being able to dominate the market.

 

[jettredmont]

Re: Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by Trekkie

So if samba becomes too much of an interoperability threat you'll bet their next version of longhorn breaks all non-MS clients.

Like their old 80s mantra. DOS isn't done until lotus won't run.

Way off subject, but you're not talking a theoretical occurence here. Microsoft broke SMB once already by switching to an encrypted password system. And XP just doesn't talk with SMB 3 very well ...