[stainlessbanner]

bttt

[nikos1121]

I agree. A smart company is one that knows their competitors products.

nikos

[July 4th]

1) MP3 is the global standard. WMA is widely supported, but really of no use to anyone. What's an MS employee to do? Convert his/her whole collection?

2) If employees are "hiding their iPods by swapping the telltale white headphones for a less conspicuous pair," it only goes to show that the listeners actually enjoy listening to their music. The iPod earbuds are more a fashion statement than an audio accessory.

[PLK]

Are iPods really that much better than the competitors?

My kid is researching this and wants to buy one (birthday and Christmas $ saved up). I have been encouraging him to consider one of the less expensive alternatives (he's 13).

[Izzy Dunne]

Here is an article with a link to the original report by Wired.

[IncPen]

Here's a link to a photo of Bill Gates c.1983 (Corbis Photos, can't post it). If you look behind Gates, on his desk, you can clearly see a Macintosh computer. If he can do it...

[Richard Kimball]

But I see more of an opportunity than a problem. In fact, I would argue that Microsoft would make even better products if more employees used other vendors' goods. Microsoft developers and their hardware partners could learn lots from the iPodders and use that knowledge to improve PlaysForSure-logo products."

This and several other comments imply that MS gosh, golly, gee whiz, has never even thought about looking at other vendors and taking ideas from them. While everything comes from something, MS has built their entire corporation on lifting ideas, modifying them slightly, incorporating them into an efficient structure and squeezing out the original innovator. In this respect, they are very much like Coke and Pepsi, who seldom create a new soft drink concept, but use superior marketing to take over markets as soon as they become slightly mature. I'm not saying this to knock MS. If they hadn't taken the PC-Dos and turned it into MS-Dos, Apple's graphical interface, Lotus 123's spreadsheet, Wordperfect's word processor, Netscape's web browser, etc., worked on them, improved them and tied them to Windows, they would be a largely irrelevent company. Those waves were coming, and MS could either adapt to them or get washed away by them.

It's just funny to see these MS employees acting like it's never occured to them to take other people's products, study them, and produce their own product to try to take over the market. Can you say XBox?

[steve-b]

employees are "hiding their iPods by swapping the telltale white headphones for a less conspicuous pair."

Or, perhaps, using their iPods effectively by swapping the bundled white headphones for a pair that doesn't suck.

[ocr1]

Didn't Microsoft buy apple stock back in 97'.

[Miss Behave]

If someone wants to take my iPod, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Greatest thing since sliced bread (well, almost.) ;-)

[ocr1]

(snip)Apple's co-founder and acting leader, Steve Jobs, announced the Microsoft deal on Wednesday at the MacWorld trade show in Boston. He said the companies would share technology and that Microsoft would invest $150 million in Apple, which helped popularize the personal computer but has suffered more than $1.6 billion in losses over the past 18 months(/snip)

That was in 97'. Here's the article Stock purchase

[LexBaird]

I always suspected that MS employees were Pod People.