Posted on 08/18/2009 4:31:11 PM PDT by Star Traveler
Letters from Microsoft: An Employee Tosses His Zune
August 18th, 2009
by Daniel Eran Dilger
Windows Enthusiasts like to paint me as biased against the Zune because I didn’t get a free gift basket from Microsoft and then turn around with a CNET-style gushing review of the me-too player that manages to consistently slink a year or two behind Apple. But what does one of Microsoft’s own developers think of the device? Here’s an independent report from a person deep inside the Zune maker.
The developer, whom I’ll call “Mike Rosoft,” volunteered the following experience with the Zune in an email: “[some months after being hired] … I did the dutiful thing and bought a Zune 120 gig, thinking it would be better than the 80g iPod I had before. I saw some plusses and minuses to the software interface and the potential of the social and Zune pass aspects (good ideas, typically flawed execution) but I didn’t give much thought to the actual audio quality.
”I figured I’m using a lossless codec, it’ll be true CD quality, I have some nice Creative Aurvana earbuds, it should sound pretty good. But I have pretty sensitive hearing, and over a long time I noticed that I wasn’t enjoying the music as much when I played it on the Zune. It didn’t sound as good as I expected it to, and I was starting to think it was a function of stress and depression, but that wasn’t it.
“Because after I got the iPhone I spent a day transcoding all the music from my collection that I expected to want to listen to from the original Apple lossless files to 256 Kbps AAC (standard iTunes Plus preset). It was only slightly involved. I’d right-click a bunch of songs, convert to AAC, and then with smart playlists and sorting on various columns, I’d drag the converted ones to my iMac with file sharing, import them to iTunes (copying them to the right directories and stripping the ” 1“ added to the name to avoid a collision with the original lossless version with the same extension) and finally deleting the transcoded version from the original PC. I lost my play counts and star ratings, but I’m fine with that.
Cutting Corners on Quality.
”After syncing the first batch and plugging in the same Aurvana earbuds, I almost instantly realized that i’d been robbed, by the Zune, because the AAC version sounded amazingly good, obviously better than the uncompressed version on the Zune. So now my whole music collection takes up like 25 gigs of flash and sounds better than I had ever expected.
“I believe they either f*cked up the DAC or the analog circuit pathways on the Zune and lost like 10dB or more of signal to noise. I think the stereo channels might be leaking into each other also. It just sounded muddy and I’d been using it all this time, not just with the earbuds but in my commute to work every day in the car.
”BTW, I think I could perhaps tell the difference between AAC and lossless after very carefully listening to each version, but the differences would be so subtle as to be meaningless in terms of enjoyability. Whatever they screwed up in the Zune to make the lossless version sound so flat and dead was much worse.
“Music is a very important part of my life and Microsoft robbed me of a portion of that enjoyment through typical corner cutting and short-sightedness. I’ve decided I’m going to find a nice grassy space this weekend and get my roommate to film me smashing up the Zune with a giant pipe wrench, a la the scene from Office Space where they smash up the printer. Should be a YouTube hit, especially with the story of why I’m doing it.
The Great Exodus of Microsoft’s Talent.
”Did I mention to you that after the layoffs, people have been resigning right and left? Always the same story, going to do something else, not sure what, but something else. Two weeks notice, see ya. I’ll be doing the same tomorrow morning along with a friend who’s quitting for the same reasons. In fact, he’s been frustrated longer than me, probably because I was blaming myself and not the real problem of the toxic work environment.
“We can’t figure out: how can you make a great product with shifty tools, and how can you make great, or even acceptable, tools on top of a shifty platform? You can’t ratchet up the quality, certainly not when you haven’t been allotted sufficient time to do so. You can only try to prevent the quality of everything from dropping further into mediocrity.”
Rosoft hasn’t yet posted his video or his story, but when he does I’ll link to it.
Up next: if you think Microsoft’s cutting corners on the Zune in the manner of the Xbox 360 is the worst example of the company’s failing to learn from its previous mistakes, get ready for a big surprise. Because Microsoft is preparing to replicate one of the biggest, most uncontroversial blunders of the recent decade in its misguided efforts to imitate Apple.
Guess what iceberg Balmer’s delirious company is going to aim towards for its next Titanic disaster! (Hint: it’s a far larger mistake than the whole ‘two years late iPod touch clone + Zune HD software problem’ I discussed in the last article.)
Yeah, I can understand... if you’ve already got something and it’s working okay... then why dump it...
But, when you do get ready to go for another one, do consider the iPod. I think you’ll be impressed with the sound — with some good earbuds (say the $50-$125 kind; they do go higher you know... :-) ...), and then the 256 AAC rip of the music (or from iTunes Music Store of the same quality rip), along with the high quality sound produced from the playback components of QuickTime in the iPod....
Put all three of those together, and it will knock your socks off... :-)
I went through the web site from the subject article, and the author definitely hates MS, but it’s a knowledgeable dislike.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that since Gates left, MS has been essentially rudderless. For years, their business model has been to take over a maturing market, but the Zune, Bing, the new MS Stores, the Aqua interface, the “Gadgets” the attempts at an online music store, all seem to be utterly clueless copying of other companies.
Microsoft’s strength has been it’s dominance and it doesn’t work well where it can’t use monopoly power to kneecap competitors.
BTW, was watching a news show on TXCN, and they were announcing the new Zune, and the news reader says, “And Microsoft is releasing the new Zuny this week. Or is it Zuun?” He looks at the other anchor and she shrugs. Then, he comes back and pronounces it correctly, and says, one of the camera men knew how to pronounce it.
Yeah, and if you’ve been around the Macintosh for a while, you know that website has been up and publishing for quite a while...
And it’s very informative, too. The guy does know what he’s talking about.
Here’s what a lot of Windows people need to know about why the quality is so much better with iTunes, iPod and QuickTime...
The Secret Weapon Inside iTunes
Apple strikes back in the battle for digital media rights, production, distribution and playback.
‘Hell froze over,’ the big headline at the release of Apple’s iTunes for Windows, may have suggested that Apple was doing the unthinkable in releasing an application for Microsoft’s Windows platform. Nothing could be more wrong.
The release of iTunes for Windows is really a chilling strike on Microsoft’s hellish plans for world domination through Digital Rights Management, and a key part of Apple’s plan to steal back leadership of the desktop digital media industry that Apple invented.
It’s a plan that’s all about QuickTime, the magic behind iTunes and really, Apple’s best kept secret. Microsoft has been trying kill QuickTime for the last decade; after attempts to compete with the technology failed, they’ve tried to threaten, sidetrack, sabotage and lately just FUD it out of existence.
While Apple faces competition from several angles, nobody anywhere offers anything that approaches the power, breadth and ability of the QuickTime Media Layer. That’s critically important because QuickTime is the last, best hope for a world of digital content not captive under the iron fist of Microsoft.
The Tech behind the Tunes
The triumvirate of Apple’s iPod, its iTunes application and its iTunes Music Store represent a convergence of Apple’s best technologies and core strengths. It pairs the company’s remarkable ability to create innovative interfaces and desirable hardware with their QuickTime Media Layer and the WebObjects database application server they acquired as part of NeXT Software in 1997.
There’s nothing really new to say about Apple’s beautiful hardware and intuitive software combination. It rocks.
As for WebObjects, its contribution is essentially a slick way to publish the interface a Mac OS X Cocoa application over the Internet, either to regular web browsers, as with the Apple Store, or to thin client applications, like the music store in iTunes. While companies like Sun like to pontificate about the future using buzzwords like ‘thin client’ and ‘network computing’, Apple quietly delivered, in iTunes, what is perhaps the largest and most impressive distributed application and thin client in the world, built upon WebObjects.
It’s certainly not obvious why Apple isn’t giving more credit to WebObjects. Before NeXT was acquired by Apple, WebObjects was about the only thing left at NeXT that Steve Jobs could get excited about. Dell built their original success in web sales using it, and the US Postal Service redefined their business with it. Apple seems to like the product pretty well, as they use it to power GSX, their internal parts and warranty repair software used worldwide by dealers and repair centers, along with support.apple.com and a host of other internal systems.
Still, the really juicy secret of iTunes for Windows has to do with QuickTime. Apple released a music application for Windows to sell music, and they sell music to sell iPods. With competing devices selling for as little as a quarter the iPod’s price, and plenty of bootleg music available on the web to freely download into simpler devices, it’s hard to imagine how Apple can command 70% of the portable music market’s dollars. The answer obviously involves the iPod’s nearly perfect design, but the real magic behind the curtain is something imitators can’t knock off: Apple’s QuickTime Media Layer. Why that’s the case will take some explaining.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes1.html
Second part...
Inside iTunes: Part II
The QuickTime Media Layer: Apple’s Best Kept Secret.
Apple defined multimedia before it was even a term, with the announcement of QuickTime in May of 1991, and its introduction at the January 1992 MacWorld in San Francisco. QuickTime was an ambitious project. While it was initially derided as a ‘jerky postage stamp video’, the technology was more than just a cutting edge movie player running on hardware that wasn’t quite to the task; it was an architecture for playing anything time related.
QuickTime developed into being essentially an operating system for media. It can package audio, video, instructions, timecodes and other temporal information using a variety of codecs; different codecs offer strengths suitable for the task at hand and the type of media. QuickTime magically handles the translation between codecs, abstracts the differences in hardware, layers together tracks of data and effects and keeps them all in sync. QuickTime also provides a programing environment to control the playback interface and orchestrate interaction between different types of media.
Apple planned their vision for QuickTime to reach beyond the Macintosh. Later that same year, in 1992, Apple announced QuickTime for Windows. Apple delivered QuickTime 2.0 first on the Mac, and then on Windows in 1994. Since QuickTime was an integrated component of the Macintosh System 7 operating system, the Windows version had to include a direct port of a lot of the secret Macintosh toolbox code. Consequently, it largely bypassed Windows to talk directly to the video hardware.
Concerned about Apple’s encroachment upon the PC market they intended to control, Microsoft released a competing standard called Video for Windows. But their product couldn’t match QuickTime’s performance because Windows, as a graphic DOS application, had never been designed to work with media.
The following year, Apple brought a legal suit against San Francisco Canyon, the developer they used to bring QuickTime to Windows. Canyon had resold Apple’s intellectual property to Intel, who then provided it to Microsoft for use in Video for Windows. In order to catch up to QuickTime’s performance on the PC, the stolen code allowed them to bypass Windows and use QuickTime’s architecture instead. Apple later sued Intel and Microsoft directly, and Microsoft was eventually forced to remove some of the offending code.
Stripped of the stolen performance code, Video for Windows became synonymous, like Microsoft Bob and WinCE, with bad software. So Microsoft entirely scrapped the name and started over with a new plan of attack. Today, while Microsoft admits on their website to having released Windows 1.0 and 2.0, and even suggests that customers used them, they carefully make no mention of Video for Windows.
Meanwhile, by 1996 Apple’s Mac OS was stagnating and begging for an overhaul or outright replacement. But QuickTime continued to shine. Apple had introduced QuickTime VR for immersive video, a QuickTime Music Architecture and new QuickTime conferencing features, and QuickTime was establishing itself as the clear leader in the content creation and distribution. This positioned the Mac as the place to create content for multimedia CDs and the developing web audience, even while the Mac platform itself lost marketshare.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes2.html
Third part...
Inside iTunes: Part III
Microsoft: We hate your baby, please kill it
Microsoft responded to QuickTime’s success with announcements for Active Movie and Active X, which planned to do everything QuickTime could do; it would even be cross platform. Microsoft even defined a new Surround Video product to compete with QuickTime VR. It turned out to be almost entirely vaporware, but the false promises did little to displace QuickTime as the architecture for video, music and other multimedia production.
Active Movie and Active X turned into little more than a movie playback system and an API for video games. Later renamed DirectShow and DirectX, it became Windows’ architecture for dealing with video and graphics. Failing to deliver on cross platform promises did not slow down Microsoft’s advances in the industry, but ignoring the Mac market did allow Apple a home base to continue developing QuickTime.
QuickTime continued to gain support from third parties with the announcement of version 3, which simplified playback within web browsers and offered a way to start Internet playback before the download was complete. This was a direct blow to Microsoft; after initially failing to anticipate the impact of the Internet, Microsoft was now determined to control both the desktop web browser and all Internet servers, particularly the potentially lucrative video streaming market.
Apple senior vice-president Avadis Tevanian Jr. testified during the Microsoft antitrust trials that Microsoft approached them and demanded they drop QuickTime as a content delivery system. According to Tevanian, Apple executive Peter Hoddie asked Microsoft officials, “Are you asking us to kill playback? Are you asking us to knife the baby?” to which Microsoft official Christopher Phillips responded, “Yes, we want you to knife the baby.”
Apple continued development on QuickTime despite efforts by Microsoft to use all their resources to obliterate the entire media content and delivery market. Further insult to Microsoft was caused by the ISO’s choice of Apple’s QuickTime, instead of Microsoft’s proposed Advanced Streaming Format, as the architecture behind the developing MPEG-4 standard.
Microsoft responded by announcing Chromeffects, a technology that promised to deliver complex multimedia over low-bandwidth connections. Using HTML, XML, C++, VBScript, and Jscript, developers would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback. A MacWeek article from August of 1998 quoted David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Communications as saying, “[Chromeffects is] cool software, and it’s not often I say Microsoft has cool software. Apple doesn’t have anything comparable.”
By the end of the year, Microsoft had shelved Chromeffects and moved on. Apple jumped decisively into the video streaming, starting 1999 with a promotional film trailer for Star Wars that attracted 6.4 million downloads. In the same year, Apple introduced QuickTime 4, which introduced streaming using standard Internet protocols, and partnered with Akamai to set up a movie trailer download site called QuickTime TV.
Apple’s late entry into the streaming server market put it in third place behind the established Real Player and Microsoft’s movie player of the week. With really no way to get installed on new PCs beyond voluntary downloads, Apple’s movie trailer park was its best chance at distribution. Apple also bundled its software with an array of hundreds of digital cameras. While Apple had the technology, Microsoft controlled the software put on desktops.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes3.html
Fourth part...
Inside iTunes: Part IV
QuickTime Strikes Back
Apple’s defiant competition with Microsoft saved QuickTime from the fate suffered by other technologies, like Java, who thought they were partnering with Microsoft and instead ended up being ‘embraced and extended’ to death. At Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, the company found an operating system and management team able to keep up the fight, and Apple unleashed a series of attacks on Microsoft’s plans to control the content delivery industry.
Apple began aggressively moving QuickTime into the pro space, rolling out features to impress broadcasters and video professionals. Apple rescued a languishing QuickTime-based non-linear film editing project at Macromedia, led by the former developer of Adobe Premier, and turned it into Final Cut Pro.
Film editors started using Final Cut Pro on the side, simply to harness the magic of QuickTime to convert media documents and churn out quick previsualizations. Four versions later, Apple has an entrenched network of diehard Final Cut editors to compete with industry leader Avid. Apple also acquired Shake developer Nothing Real and Logic developer Emagic, further building upon plans to play in the high end digital production world.
QuickTime has also conquered on the low end, being the key component to a series of consumer applications that take advantage of its magic. QuickTime powers most digital cameras, particularly ones that also capture video and audio clips. Apple’s FireWire has been built into every digital camcorder as the standard way to move DV content, and QuickTime makes using DV as easy as using an audio-in jack. Similarly, Apple’s own iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD and iMovie enable home users to work with digital media with the ease of a word processor. QuickTime’s support for the underlying details enabled Apple’s success in quickly rolling out the ‘iLife’ suite of tools and in introducing iChat/AV for video conferencing.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes4.html
Fifth part... [last one in this series...]
Inside iTunes: Part V
D.R.M. or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Of course, the QuickTime architecture isn’t needed to simply listen to music. Where QuickTime again becomes a key technology is in the area of Digital Rights Management. DRM aims to control digital media so it can only be used in ways the creator wants. Content creators, and particularly their distributors and marketers, have a history of severe paranoia, always worried that content users are not paying them as much as they could be.
The movie industry fought viciously against the introduction of the VCR, fearing they would lose profits if consumers could watch programming without commercials, or copy films for playback by an audience other than the one intended. The introduction of Digital Audio Tape was so feared by music labels that they insisted on draconian copy protection systems being legislated into the standard, which jacked up the price and delayed DAT until it was largely irrelevant. With the invention of recordable optical disc technologies, labels are again looking for a way to distribute content locked down to a single use.
Microsoft quickly acted to design an architecture of severely restricted media use. Through an initiative called Windows Media, the company licensed designs for playback devices that use a special file format locked down by the media creator. An array of security levels provide for different levels of paranoia, but also contribute to confusion for users.
Before Windows Media, CD buyers knew they could play the CD in any CD player, and rip tracks from the CD to copy for use with digital mp3 players. With Windows Media, a purchased track might only work on a computer or a special player, may or may not be able to be recorded to CD, and if fees aren’t paid for a subscription, all the content they think they own can suddenly expire. Additionally, if a purchased track fails in an attempt by a user to record it to CD, Windows Media might assume the task was complete and expire the ‘right’ to try burning it again.
Windows Media is a hit with distributors and manufacturers, but consumers have failed to show much support for the services that use it. If consumers had no other choice, Windows Media might eventually catch on. To that end, Microsoft hopes to make common standards like mp3 go away, replaced with the Windows Media format it owns.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Apple, with iTunes for Windows, has introduced a far more consumer friendly system of DRM that allows users consistent and reasonable rights to use what they purchase, and provides reasonable protections for media creators and distributors.
Apple’s DRM is built into QuickTime. Suddenly, protected tracks bought through iTMS can play back on QuickTime anywhere, from Macs to PCs to Apple’s own iPod. Tracks can also be burned to CD to play anywhere CDs play. Microsoft countered the iTunes success by complaining that Apple’s system fails to support Windows Media, and warned that would limit its appeal to consumers who want the right to buy Microsoft technology. Windows users responded by downloading iTunes and installing QuickTime.
Apple has established itself as the destination for purchased music on the Internet, defined the standard for reasonableness in protected media, developed and built the most desirable music player in the industry, and offered consumers an alternative to Windows Media. And this week, Apple deployed to millions of Windows users, voluntarily, the latest version of their QuickTime software, further extending their reach in providing cross platform media creation and playback. Hell certainly has frozen over.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes5.html
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A side note here.... DRM has finally been removed from the songs at the iTunes Music Store, as the music companies finally “gave up” and took if off the table. Apple finally won out over the music companies, in this instance... :-)
That still has nothing to do with the browser. THe browser is nothing but a portal for you to access and download information.
And when did I say the browser had anything to do with it?
I was still thinking of the original guy who I replied too who said his downloads sound better because of Safari instead of IE8.
aft_lizard, you were saying — I was still thinking of the original guy who I replied too who said his downloads sound better because of Safari instead of IE8.
—
Again, to point out what I think was being said — is that the sound was better *after* he downloaded Safari, and I believe that this could very well be the case, because the QuickTime components were also downloaded with Safari and installed at the same time (at least they were doing that in the beginning). And if that is so, then those QuickTime components can very well make the audio sound a lot better (of course, also depending on the quality of the source-sound, too...).
When you install Safari, you also install Quicktime - and QT proceeds to become your default audio codec.
Which sounds better.
Roughly Drafted is a nice site, but I stopped reading when Dilger came out as a huge Obama supporter.
You said — Roughly Drafted is a nice site, but I stopped reading when Dilger came out as a huge Obama supporter.
—
Well, I don’t care for Al Gore either and he’s got idiotic ideas about Global Warming — but I still buy Apple Macintosh and their other products.... :-)
Well, the difference there is that Al Gore isn’t exerting direct control over the creation of Apple’s products. Dilger exerts direct control over the content of his site, including a bizarre rant about health care during the election and how we need government-run health care so no one will be turned down. (Except, government health care systems turn people down all the time in the name of cutting costs, a fact that totally flies over his head.)
When he posted that, I stopped visiting.
Well..., some people are idiots in some parts of their lives... LOL... But, I usually only pay attention to the parts that people are smart in...
And this is what I find with most people anyway. No one cover the whole gamut of their experience with sensibility. Everyone is usually an idiot “somewhere”... :-)
Indeed. But it would have been more tolerable if he had placed the rants in a separate category, rather than sandwiching it between Apple articles.
Sure, and that does cheapen the good work he would do otherwise. It’s too bad in that respect.
Exactly.
Just a side note, but the article talks about the Zune’s inferior sound quality to a given iPod. Ironically, you can go on audiophile forums (or at least forums full of people who pose as audiophiles) and they’ll refer to the iPod’s sound quality as total junk.
I just chuckle a little bit.
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