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Apple is more in danger from shrinking shares than anybody else because they stand alone in their standards. If HP or Dell falls apart that doesn't hurt the PC market as a whole because more than like that percentage is just shifting from one brand of WIntel to another. If Apple loses market it's going from non-WIntel to WIntel. The fact is Apple's market percentage would be great if they weren't a seperate platform with it's own set of standards and a seperate need for software. Unfortunately it is. As for conversions we'll watch the percentage. A lot of those things were cheared before, and the number went down. One of the biggest business sins Apple does is that they spend a lot of time and money preaching to the choir. The keep making their computers more Maccy, which the Apple fans love and they just gobble it up, but that moves them further away from the desktop market and a more dramatic conversion for people leaving PCs. That's how they get huge sales and a shrinking percentage.

This isn't a market transition this is piracy and bootlegging. There's a difference between MP3s circulated legitimately and illegal distribution. Stay on target. What's going to bring the government into this is the bootlegging, it's against the law, that makes it the governments business. Even if there is a market transition to this MP3 crap that still has no bearing on the illegal bootlegging.

Why are you so addicted to paypal? It's cut, my wife uses it, but it's strength is in allowing individuals to do online transactions as seller or buyer. If you're gong to be an incorporated body driving real money through your system fork over the vendor fees to Visa and Mastercard and do it right. Signing on to those costs more, but the vendor gets tons of fraud protection for those extra fees.

You're dodging the point. Just because MS has money doesn't mean they shouldn't try to thwart illegal distribution of their software. I know rich companies aren't popular but the fact is that software piracy is illegal and it doesn't become less illegal to pirate it because the maker is MS.

You need to restudy the music industry. Only a dozen or so artists a year sell 1 million records, they're the top dogs. Maybe three times that many go gold (500 thousand). The judgment for successful is does the album pay for itself. The CD is advertising for the tour, that's where bands make their money. But the CD doesn't push the tour if somebody isn't pushing the CD, that's where the music company comes in. There are plenty of bands out there trying your model right now, they can do it because they haven't sold to a record company. They're doing the raw form, straight out through the internet in MP3s and home printed CDs. None of the ones I've run into have quit their day jobs. The model doesn't work. The internet is too big and not omnipresent enough. What makes the current model work is that somebody who doesn't track band X (they like them but they don't follow the music press, which is 95% of the fans out there) is walking buy the music store in the mall peaks in and sees a poster advertising band X's new album. They wander in, they buy it the clerk mentions the tour is coming here they go, walla. Any model that doesn't allow the casual fan to stumble upon the new album and the tour info while going through their daily lives won't work. It's not now it won't later.

I'm glad you pointed out BWP. Why did BWP succeed? Because it had a 2 year advertising campaign. They were plugging the hell out of that thing forever in every way imaginable. And what happened? Well eventually their independant advertising got the attention of some of the right people and they got invited into festival circuit, where they got connected with even more right people, and then a major movie company bought the rights, kicked the advertising into even higher gear, did the mass production, ran it through the well established distribution network, and walla, an "indy movie" success story. BWP isn't a success if they don't get the deep pockets. Dozens of indie movies a year hit the festivals and end their shelf life there, many more never even get to that.

Apple is more in danger from shrinking shares than anybody else because they stand alone in their standards.

So does Wintel in its "standards." Windows is less of an open standard than OSX. OSX is built on Mach 3.0, FreeBSD 3.3 and OpenSTEP. Intel processors are just as proprietary, or open for that matter, as a PPC G3/G4. In fact the PC world is at a significant disadvantage over the Mac world: it has no single hardware and software provider to make decisions on how the platform evolves. What will happen when PC customers have to start choosing between Itaniums and x86-64? It's going to happen because Macs are slated to begin moving to the 64bit PPC G5 in the next few years. Once that happens the PC world will have no choice but to move to 64bit processors or it will get ripped a new one benchmarkwise by Macs

The keep making their computers more Maccy, which the Apple fans love and they just gobble it up

Actually OSX is a major break from a lot of "Maccy" things. It behaves more like a 3-way cross between Windows, MacOS 9 and UNIX than the original MacOS. A lot of Windows users are shocked at how slick my installation of OSX looks on my 3 year old PowerBook G3 compared to their WindowsXP installation on their 1 year old PCs. The fact that I can run OS X rather well on a 3 year old PowerBook which has only a 333mhz processor and 192MB of Ram says a lot and I point out how old my PB is.

Microsoft's push for DRM/Palladium will alienate a lot of users because it will interfere in their daily activities. Microsoft knows that their "initiative" cannot be accomplished without fundamental changes to the OS. Programs like Winamp won't be able to run because the Winamp crew is known for being very anarchistic. They were the guys that created Gnutella for God's sake. Nothing short of an act of God, a FBI swat team bashing down their office doors or a direct order from the AOLTW brass could get them to not fully support MP3 and Ogg Vorbis even if that means telling Microsoft to take its DRM and shove it up its ass.

As a former Linux user I am realistic enough to know that Linux will never be ready for the average user, especially not since OSX-based systems are pretty cheap, very reliable and easy to use. The only OS that can potentially "save" the PC market is OpenBeOS, however that will take another 1-2 years to get fully into Beta stage.

And about the issue regarding band promotion, there is actually a simple solution: integrate MP3.com into AOL/Compuserve and get it a primetime spot on Yahoo and MSN's music sections. If major bands were to start getting listed there, like say get Creed listed in the alternative/hard rock section they could retool their DBs to monitor every rock band bought by someone who buys from Creed and then list two options on the Creed page: "Full List of Bands Supported By Other Creed Fans" or "Up and Coming Artists Liked by Creed Fans." The former is obviously what it name says and the 2nd list is created by monitoring bands based on activity. Those with consistant sales and strong sales activity during a certain period relative to their size would be promoted in this list. For example a band that has been on for 6 months and has sold 200 copies of its first release online would be listed here since 200 sales in such a short period of time for a new band online as opposed to out of the trunk of the band's car/van or at a gig is pretty good.