Entries Tagged 'Microsoft' ↓

In Canada we can’t yet use the iTunes Music Store, which is bad enough, the only legal download site is called Puretracks. Trouble is, when I go to the site I get the following message:

Thank you for visiting Puretracks.com
Currently our website supports Internet Explorer 5.0 and above on the
Windows operating system (Win 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / 2003),
and is available to Canadian residents only.
We value our Mac audience, however the Windows Media player for the Mac
platform is not currently compatible with Microsoft protected audio content.
Puretracks is currently working to make our service available to Mac users.

There are several problems with this. First of all, saying you value an audience while locking them out is NOT valuing that audience. More importantly, though, I think the companies trying to make a go of online music that tie that effort to a proprietary platform are making a big mistake and can’t, in the long term, succeed with such a strategy. The encoding method used by Apple, on the other hand, is available to anyone who wishes to use it, with no approval or license required from Apple. Tying DRM to the encoding itself is a serious conceptual mistake that a lot of people are making, and no matter how many companies signed up to play in the Microsoft sandbox I don’t think they can do well.

Microsoft acquires Virtual PC from Connectix.

have posted a clear and compelling article about why MSN doesn’t work with Opera. If correct, it is clear that MSN is intentionally sending Opera 7 (and no other browser) a version of the stylesheet that is intentionally broken. Nice.

that a company who manages to alienate so many people is adored by so many at the same time. The latest: Microsoft rips off ‘Digital Diva’.

makes a very good point. If MS is broken up you get 2-5 little Microsofts running around, each of which will own some killer technologies that, if anything, are under-exploited now. Imagine if a Word group wanted to push to make their underlying text engine the standard, integrated into anything and everything. Like that, x 10.

going to talk about the Microsoft decision cause it’s just too boring. But MSFT deserves what it gets. It has nothing to do with quality - it’s about denying others the ability to build quality to compete with you.