Microsoft To Release 'iPod Killer' at Christmas? 614
ShellFish writes "According to a report from Engadget, Microsoft is poised to finally take on the Apple iPod this holiday season. Tired of uninspiring offerings from its hardware partners, Microsoft is getting into the ring itself. The new media player from Microsoft will feature a bigger screen than the iPod Video, have built-in WiFi for downloading music without a PC, and Microsoft will work with music and TV content providers to build an iTunes Music Store competitor. In what may be the crucial competitive stroke, Microsoft will also allow you to download from its store any song that you've purchased from Apple, unlocking users from iPod's vendor lock-in."
Oragami (Score:1, Interesting)
Woah (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll assume the summary leaves out the crucial word "free" in there. If so, that's pretty damn clever. I just wonder how/if MS will get the music cartels to agree to it, other than wholescale bombing of their headquarters' into submission by the Windows Air Force.
Re:Not going to buy it (Score:4, Interesting)
A wide library was extremely important to me. I like being able to go weeks without hearing a song again, and none of the other players I saw even came close in capacity. They need more jiggawatts.
Janus? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Woah (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm going to be encouraging everyone I know to sign up for the service and download the Microsoft versions of their iTunes libraries - and then cancel their subscription.
Re:Not only that... (Score:3, Interesting)
MS's own DRM-crippled music files are proprietary.
iPod's can play plain ol' MP3s just fine. They do not require AAC.
Signed,
Fake-troll-hater hater
Re:Woah (Score:1, Interesting)
Really, can you direct me to a link showing how people consider a 160kbps WMA higher quality than a 128kbps AAC? Or are you just assuming that because the WMA is using a higher bit rate that it is better? If I were concerned about being "locked in", why would I trade one proprietary format for another? If I wanted to turn that WMA into an MP3 and make it truely universal, I'd lose fidelity anyway, so what is the benefit here?
Personally I just by my used cd's, rip them lossless, and convert to whatever I need. No DRM, no format/bitrate lockin, best audio quality, no worries about having my hd go south and losing my collection.
Re:Not only that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll wait for Apple's next iteration after this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple and RIAA are laughing softly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Survey of High Schoolers: iPod not built to las (Score:2, Interesting)
OGG? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, that's all very well, but will it play my OGG files?
Re:Survey of High Schoolers: iPod not built to las (Score:5, Interesting)
These were part-tme MBA students (ie worknig professionals by day) who had taken statistics and maketing and were working under the supervision of a professor who has been hired by large corporation to do just such studies. Now this was a class project, not a corporate sponsord project, so it was small scale and regional (southern California) compared to an Apple sponsored study but it included interviews, questionaires, and focus groups. The results are not so easily dismissed. The sample size was significant, distributions, p-values, and other sanity checks on the data were good.
You object to students being the segment studied? Have you seen Apple's commercials? This is Apple's target market.
You fail to mention the players the iPod was compared to.
The survey covered needs, wants, perceptions, and customer satisfaction for whatever portable digital player were used. It was not an iPod study per se, iPod was just the most common player.
You say lack of AM/FM is seen as a negative. But is it a missing feature that would influence a significant amount of people's buying decisions?
It was a recurring missing "want". As stated in the original posts, the respondents said that they traded this want for the "status symbol" nature of the iPod.
"(*) I expect Apple has similar research of their own and it probably inspired the Radio Remote. I'd wager future models will have it built in." I'll take that bet. I don't think those things are flying off the shelves. Seems more like a specialty add-on for the small minority who want it to me.
The fact that Apple introduced such a product undermines your argument. If Apple's research showed it to be such a niche product they would have left it to third parties.
You fail to mention the iTunes factor. It's not all about the hardware. How did that figure into this survey?
They did not like being unable to transfer the files, a general DRM problem. MP3s were the preferred format.
[sidebar] iTune isn't really much of a factor anyways. I believe Jobs once stated that the average customer spent US$70. Not much of a lock-in, but that's a different thread (literally). [/sidebar]
I can't stress enough that I do not own an iPod, or care to.
I own one, 2nd generation, the first that were available for PCs. I happy with it.
I just hate to see know-it-alls throw around pointless and and arbitrary surveys like this as data we should all respect.
Really, from reading your post it seemed that you disliked the results and made many erroneous assumptions to rationalize why you should reject the data. As I pointed out it seems consistent with Apple's behavior with respect to radio. It's small scale and regional, but it was done by knowledgeable people under the supervision of experts.
Re:One jailer for another (Score:3, Interesting)
What MS is doing here is the same thing it did with the PCs in the late 80s. It is bringing up the danger of single source vending, e.g. everthing comes from Apple, while brushing over the single source software, i.e. everything software come from MS. Even though one may have some buffer in that one has choices in hardware, there is still much pain cuased by the fact that MS ultimately control your fate, in much the same way that Apple does.
But there is a greater problem that is overlooked. Play for sure does not seem to be a fixed playing field like fairplay is. Each vendor, each manufacturer, each label, each artist can set limits on what can be done to the music. For example, we might find that it can only be downloaded to one device, or burned to a single backup in WMP format only, or not shared. Perhaps when MS updates the OS, the music files will not validate until the user has a legal copy of the updated OS. I am not try to spread FUD, just saying we do not know what the MS device will do becuase it does not exist, nor do we know what MS will do if it gets the 80% market share. All we know it what it has in the past.
Thanks - I'll Stick To CDs (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone keeping count? (Score:3, Interesting)
GPS receivers? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what the very recent ones are like -- maybe they're built like crap -- because I'm still using my Magellan GPS 300, purchased back in 2000. It's waterproof (hell, it floats), dustproof, shockproof, and short of smashing it with a hammer, basically close to indestructible under normal use. The only comment I have to say about it is that the screen can get scratched if you're not careful; I solve this by keeping it inside an old sock.
Granted, it's a whole lot bigger than an iPod, and pretty spartan in terms of features. It basically does one thing in life (tell you where you are in your choice of coordinate systems) and that's it. I'm not sure what sort of tradeoffs they made in order to create something so rugged: I imagine one that wasn't would be a lot smaller and probably would have been cheaper. It's all about what you want.
There are doubtless some of us (geeks, especially) who would find the idea of an MP3 player the size of a brick and about as hard to destroy attractive. But the resulting product would not be an iPod, and would not sell like one.
Been waiting for this a while now (Score:0, Interesting)