Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Microsoft's Consumer Electronics Endgame
Posted by James Fee in "ARTICLE" @ 08:30 AM
"It doesn't matter that Microsoft doesn't lead in music downloads right now, though if you combined all the different WMA music stores, it might come close to Apple's iTunes. What's important is that Microsoft *owns* the alternative to Apple and is already branching out to areas like movies and home-recorded content. It's amazing to see history repeating itself, no? Apple lost the PC desktop because it refused to license its Graphical User Interface and now they're going to lose the Consumer Electronics market because they've failed to license their FairPlay DRM technology. Everyone was laughing at Bill Gates' gaffs this week at the CES. The bluescreen of death, etc. But did you *see* what they were showing off? They have set top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs, portable video players, game consoles and more all running Microsoft software, and most importantly, all supporting the same Windows Media codec and DRM. The final piece of the puzzle was the TiVo To Go announcement. Now it's not just content you buy, it's your personal content as well."
CES has turned into the Microsoft show these days. Almost every device either supports a Microsoft format or is built upon a Microsoft platform. The big question is not if Microsoft will overtake Apple, but when they will. We'll see how this Macworld goes, but I'm going out on a limb here and say this could be the high point for Apple's digital dominance.
CES has turned into the Microsoft show these days. Almost every device either supports a Microsoft format or is built upon a Microsoft platform. The big question is not if Microsoft will overtake Apple, but when they will. We'll see how this Macworld goes, but I'm going out on a limb here and say this could be the high point for Apple's digital dominance.
