News Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill

An eye opening Wired article, that reports 80% of Redmond employees have an iPod, despite the prevelence of WMA based players and a flurry of memos frowning on the use of them:

Microsoft's leafy corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, is beginning to look like the streets of New York, London and just about everywhere else: Wherever you go, white headphones dangle from peoples' ears.

To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's management, Apple Computer's iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft's workers.

"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."

The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.

So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.

More here

Interesting read, no?

You have to ask yourself why 80% of the workforce would buy an iPod over their own companies competing products / technologies. I suppose a certain percentage of these people will have gotten one for the 'cool' / 'trendy' factor that an iPod has, and that some of the employees will be non-technical guys that may not have the knowledge to set up a competing player. But even so, that must leave an awful lot of geeky techs that have chosen to tread the dark path and risk the ire of managment.

 

I want to know WHY the Archos hasn't become more popular. They were out first, have a load of background and alternate OS's, and support more formats?! WHYYYYY?!

 

Odds are a 40 Gig MS-Pod is not one of the job perks

 

Like most people they follow the trend of what's perceived to be cool by their friends. I owned a 20GB IPOD, basically only bought one as I saw everyday on TV that owning one would change my life. It didn't at all and I sold the thing to a friend of mine. Used some of the money to buy a 74GB 10k rpm Raptor hard drive for my gaming PC. Much better choice.
Now if Apple puts out an IPOD with a Sirius satellite radio tuner, I think I might jump back on the band wagon.

 

Do MS actually make an MP3 player? No? Then why are they complaining?

 

They appear to be complaining since the iPod doesn't support WMA.

 

Perhaps if they put a bit of work into making .wma a decent audio standard, other parties might be willing to start supporting it. MP3 is proven, solid, does everything most consumers want, free from constrictive copy protection measures and provides decent sound quality / compression ratios when a good compressor (read lame) is used.

Any user wanting to take advantage of the legal download sites can use iTunes and Apple's reasonably adequate proprietary audio codec, so .wma is superfluous there.

The only way any codec can make significant inroads is by showing benefits over what has already permeated the market. Thus I'd like to see greater uptake of Ogg Vorbis, which provides a better quality to filesize ratio, is totally open source, and is free from some of mp3's annoying quirks (notably Vorbis provides gapless playback, which can only be done with mp3 by way of a workaround).

I don't think anyone cares about wma support - does anyone with any sense use it? I don't know anyone that does - but I will not buy an iPod or any other music player that doesn't support Vorbis. Hence why I'm going for the Cowon i-Audio M3.
[/rant]

 

Thing is that Microsoft's entire media (read audio *and* video) strategy is built from an industry rather than a consumer standpoint.

MS don't really care what the consumer wants or needs, they want their DRM and delivery technology to be bought and adopted by the record labels and movie studios, while they in turn try and crack down on unencrypted options. Thus, by default, according to the grand Billg masterplan, the Windows Media Center becomes the de-facto standard for home media content delivery and replay.

Yes, thankfully. Apple managed to get the jump, and it's a darn good thing they did.

Well, yes and no. Ultimately a lot of the general public don't care about bitrate versus quality; when you're listening on a crappy pair of $5 headphones the ultimate fidelity of the source isn't an overriding issue. All a lot of them want to do is put their songs on their portable players, or in their cars, with the minimum of hassle and the maximum amount of interoperability. To a large extent, mp3 already does that so any competitor always has to offer a unique selling point - which is why MS are so heavy on the DRM angle. The assumption is that if they can get the industry to buy into it, what we, as consumers, want, will become a secondary issue.

 

I use WMA, just because thats the default rip format in WMP. I have no problems with it, and it plays on my MP3 player, plus has smaller filesizes. So it's fine for me.

 

wonder how much of that 40gb ipod that the M$ employee has is taken up by downloaded music?

 

how out of the questionis it for the ipod to support wma?
would that raise monopoly concerns or dismiss them?
and it would stop some of the nay sayers?
and would stop me from having two copies of my music (1 wma 192 2 mp3 192)

 

WMA is licensed property of MS.
AAC is better than WMA
AAC is licensed property of Dolby (Dolby invented it, not apple. Anyone can buy a license.)
MP3 is licensed property of Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft

Apple is already paying a license fee to Dolby and Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft - why would they add a license fee to MS for an inferior product?
For that matter - WiMP10 comes with a WMA encoder - why doesn't it come with an MP3 encoder - you have to pay $$ (or steal) to get an MP3 encoder for WiMP.

Whatever the format used as the primary for legal music over the internet, it must support DRM so the record labels will support it.

iTunes plays ogg-vorbis and can convert it to MP3 or AAC, but the iPod can't play ogg-vorbis without converting them first. It is too bad. Does anyone know if ogg-vorbis supports DRM?

 

wmp10 does have an mp3 encoder and it allows you to rip at 320 kps
whats the point of aac drm when i can burn it to a cd with itunes and then rip it with wmp10?

 

.

 

Whoo, cdex. Good program, that.

 

Cool - didn't know. WiMP9 and before didn't have one, you had to buy a plugin from a third party.

The point of AAC DRM? If you tell the record companies that you have DRM, they will let you sell music online. That's it I think....

 

edit: blah ignore this post

 

Okay, so they don't care about quality (I think this is proven by the shocking quality of your average Kazaa file!) but my point remains valid - to gain a foothold in any saturated market, you need to demonstrate a benefit over the existing players in the oligopoly. AAC gains because it has DRM and is natively supported by iPod, and is of similar quality to decent MP3, and better than WMA. WMA gains share because it is the native format of WMP and for all its failings WMP is a do-it-all media player that is effectively ubiquitous, and it has DRM support and support from a large number of portable manufacturers, software player writers, and online music stores. OGG will *hopefully* gain some share as it is technically by far the most efficient codec, and its open source nature means any software or hardware can implement it freely, without paying a license fee.

 

Yeah, tis true. In a conventional market where everyone played by the same rules, you'd be right about needing to demonstrate tangible benefits. Trouble is that Microsoft have the willingness to use their market position to subvert the conventional rules.

The big random factor in all this has been the impact of MS' bundling policies, both in terms of getting WMP into people's computers as the default (and often only) media player, and the knock-on damage that's been done to the third party media player market as a result.

Thing is though that while thee, me and the other reader know what the relative strengths of the different compression formats are, millions more wouldn't know what a codec was if it bit them on the bum. I daresay if you asked the majority of iPod owners what AAC was, they'd give you a blank stare and ask to phone a friend.

It's people like that who MS have tried to nab via the creation/free distribution/bundling of WMP, although, thankfully, Apple have got such a foothold in the market that, for once, MS aren't going to be able to steamroller everything the way they did with browsers.

Even now, you've only got to look at MS' behaviour in response to the European Union ruling to see that they're still trying to stick their fingers up. Giving the "WMP-free" version of XP a name about as appealing as syphilis, sticking a "Download Windows Media Player" link on its default desktop, while selling the license at the same price as the full edition? Yeah, that's likely to make system builders want to use it.

Trouble is, with the content providers looking at lock-down access, lock-down access and, well, lock-down access as the top priorities, sound quality is going to be very much an afterthought. Unfortunately.

You've only got to look at the watermarking used by many of the so-called anti-rip technologies to see that a large number of the record companies have already decided that the best sound quality doesn't ultimately matter.

 

Which is an absolute ****ing disgrace, to be honest. You pay ten quid for a CD and the distributor has either corrupted it so you can't play it in your car, DVD player, CD-ROM drive or half the decent hi-fi CD decks at all, or else you can only play a crappily encoded compressed and DRMed version on your PC, not the actual raw audio data, or else it's full of deliberately introduced corruption that is supposedly inaudible yet in some cases is quite plain, and definitely makes the disc less scratch resistant.

Thing is, it doesn't even deter piracy - I'm quite sure you can equally easily download a supposedly protected album over bit-torrent, kazaa etc. as you can an unprotected one. As we've discussed, most people don't care two cents about sound quality so they won't mind if it's been copied over a crappy portable CD player to the computer via a line-line connection. The only people who lose out are the people who genuinely care about the quality of their music and who probably will want to have the original CD for that reason.

Added to this, preventing people from ripping CDs they've paid good money for into whatever format they like for their own use is tantamount to Nazism as far as I'm concerned.

This explains why I will not ever buy a CD with copy protection measures on it. I'm almost tempted to download it illegally as a matter of principle! If enough people do the same, the record industry might finally get the message, realise that the way to tackle piracy is by pricing their products fairly, and ease off on their half witted ideas.