Posted on 07/22/2006 7:06:12 AM PDT by The Lion Roars
Microsoft Corp. said Friday it plans to release a new music and entertainment player and accompanying software under the "Zune" brand this year, in a belated attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod player.
The announcement comes after weeks of rumors and speculation about such an offering. Microsoft has already touted the products to record companies.
"Under the Zune brand, we will deliver a family of hardware and software products, the first of which will be available this year," said Chris Stephenson, general manager of market for entertainment and services at Microsoft, in an statement. "We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together."
The world's largest software maker faces an uphill climb in closing the gap on Apple's (Charts) iPod media player and iTunes Music Store, the runaway leaders in their respective areas.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
It's more accurate to say that Apple represents American innovation at it's finest.
Considering the size of Microsoft's R&D budget, they amount of innovation that MS actually produces is pathetic.
I'm sorry you're having problems, but inaccurate statements like "the Apple music file format is not compatible with PC CD burning" will not go uncorrected on this forum.
I use a 'cassette adapter' that came with a CD player to play my iPod through my truck's stereo system. I have an older 10 gig iPod--still haven't filled it. Along with music I can play foreign language lessons, books on disk, etc. Very handy for me. Sorry it hasn't worked out for you.
Gates and Microsoft also have a history of working cooperatively with "partners", then knee-capping them when they're ready to make their move. I don't think they do it as much anymore, but I read complaints from both Lotus and Wordperfect that when they were trying to develop early Windows versions of 1-2-3 and Wordperfect, that MS would give them information about how to make calls to printer programs, screen rewrites, etc., then change the underlying code six months later. They claimed MS knew they were going to make the changes, and already had the new coding in their Office applications, but waited until they'd actually put the changes on the market to notify other software manufacturers, especially those making products that competed with MS. This made competing products look buggy.
Gates made a brilliant move in getting MS-DOS on all PCs, and cutting IBM out of software. He then leveraged that to make MS the dominant software manufacturer. However, MS has never been an innovative company. They've watched for markets to emerge, then used their size and deep pockets to operate at a loss until they ran the competitors out of business. After they dominate a market, all innovation ceases (Note Internet Explorer).
In the office arena, you could buy Office for $99 when Lotus and WP were still viable threats, and MS included free copies of Word with Windows for quite a while. As soon as they'd crushed the competition, Office went to $499 for a new retail version.
Although they're still successful, Microsoft is starting to collapse under it's own weight. They abandoned Longhorn because completely rewriting the OS turned into a quagmire. Now, Vista is XP+, with belated attempts to add OSX features.
They're attempting to address this, and the video "If Microsoft marketed the iPod", created by a MS team, was a cautionary tale to the developers. The announcement that MS was entering the player market shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who saw this video. MS doesn't do stuff for grins; it was a clever analysis of competing styles in a market they were looking to enter. MS wants to dominate home media, and they're seeing Apple make big strides in that area. They're not particularly worried about the music market, as much as they are the video and movie market. They want to be the proprietary system controlling all the tv tuners and movie services in the country, and they DON'T want an open system. They want everything to be WMV or whatever proprietary format they come up with, and they want you to get a screen that says, "You MUST buy several hundred dollars worth of Microsoft products to play this video" to come up if you try to access content with any other system.
That's their goal. Their problem is that Hollywood trusts Jobs (as CEO of Pixar, he's one of them) and they don't trust Microsoft.
My XBOX360 just died this week. It has a fatal hardware issue. I called Microsoft did get it fixed. They guy on the phone said they are getting many phonecalls for warranty work. The heatsink is bad. No 360 for three weeks.
The other issue with 360 is there aren't many games released for it.
Windoze lovers are so insecure....I wonder why? Do they have Macintosh envy?
Microsoft got it's start by doing a knock off of the Mac OS.....I think they don't want to admit this. What substantial hardware does Microsoft make?????
Oh yeah....the superb Microsoft mouse and keyboard.....Yawn....
ping
ping
If Bill Gates and Microsoft have their way...... Microsoft=SkyNet
Pull the plug while we can. Not many industries in a free market are allowed
such monopolies. What is the percentage of market share???? 90 plus percent.
This is only good for Microsoft and not the people. PC's with a Microsoft OS are nothing but a honey pot for a plethera of dangerous viruses, spyware, adware, worms, trojans, etc, etc. coming from the cesspool that is called the Internet.
"Windoze lovers are so insecure...."
Hah Hah!
"....I wonder why? Do they have Macintosh envy? "
It's so true....90% market share and most of you feel sooooo threatened by little ol Apple with it's 5 percent market share.
Uh, you lost me at the bakery. The Firefox search bar has Alta Vista, Yahoo, Google, Answers.com and a couple of other search engines installed, and you can easily add any search engine you want. While they may have a deal with Google, they don't attempt to block you from using other services.
As to your comment that you're getting MSNBC to play with Win2K and an earlier version of IE and Windows Media player 9, they're still all MS proprietary products. The fact that the site tells you to get newer versions than are actually necessary doesn't invalidate my point.
You know, I haven't insulted you in my posts. As to your claim on XBox, according to initial reports, Microsoft is selling the new XBox at approximately a $136 per unit loss.
This was mentioned in my first post, that MS has deep enough pockets to operate at a loss in areas until they dominate the industry.
Apple is primarily targeting home, education, video production and small business markets with products like Mac OS X Server, XServe, XGrid, XSAN, ARD, WebObjects, etc., and third-party products like MySQL, Oracle, Apache, etc.
Most of Microsoft's products are a big stinking pile of low-quality crap.
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