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Buy.com's music store: For your IEs only | |
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| Time: 17:16 EST/22:16 GMT | News Source: News.com | Posted By: Jonathan Tigner | ||
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Buy.com today launched BuyMusic.com, which sells downloads of songs and albums--much like Apple's Macintosh-only iTunes site. While the company makes no bones about the fact that its entire service is based on Microsoft technologies, its exclusion of all but Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is likely to raise the ire of standards advocates. Those advocates argue that the existence of Web standards, set chiefly by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), means that any standards-compliant browser should be able to access and use any Web site. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on the site goes on to explain that the site uses a Microsoft proprietary technology called ActiveX in order to unlock Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls that aim to prevent unauthorized distribution. | ||
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| #1 By 3653 (209.149.57.116) at 7/22/2003 6:08:27 PM |
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my site serves 8M+ hits per day... and over the past 30 days... netscape and mozilla combined account for 0.75% of the traffic. With stats like that, of course buy.com and others aren't going to type an extra line of code to support it.
another look at it... half way down the page... http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html |
| #2 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 7/22/2003 6:22:59 PM |
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First, "means that any standards-compliant browser should be able to access and use any Web site." is a pipe dream. Supposedly standards-compliant browsers *cough*Mozilla*cough* don't support the "standards" worth crap.
Second, the HTML standard doesn't contain much of anything, let alone DRM functionality, so until the W3C comes up with a standard for client-side active functionality, there are no standards governing their use and therefore Buy.com is justified in its use. Buy.com must protect the IP of the vendors whose products its selling and you can't do that on just any platform or browser. Besides, since IE still is the browser-of-choice for like 95% of the people out there, I don't think Buy.com has much to fear as far as market repercussions. Of course, the hugely vocal tiny minority Linux crowd will slam Buy.com |
| #3 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 7/22/2003 7:01:58 PM |
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What else are they supposed to do? Should Buy.com just do nothing because there are no competitors to Microsoft?
Buy.com needs to do DRM as a business and legal requirement. Should they just role over because of a few complaining Mozilla users? I think business need to do what they need to do to stay competitive and if it starts getting bad, a competitor will stand up to challenge. It's called Capitalism and it works pretty well, in case you haven't noticed. So far, most of MS' competitors are bumbling idiots and can't produce a good product to save their own careers(quite literally). Should MS and buy.com roll over because no one is smart enough to challenge MS? That's retarded. |
| #4 By 2459 (69.22.78.116) at 7/22/2003 7:07:15 PM |
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Given that the service uses WMA 9 DRM files as its distribution format, requiring IE shouldn't be a big deal. WMP 7.1 and up all require IE anyway. IIRC, there's only 1 or 2 3rd-party players that support Windows Media DRM content.
Also, the only non-Windows desktop platform that will be able to play WMA 9 DRM content legally will likely be Mac OS X. If Buy.com wanted to also target these users, they only need to add Safari compatibility. Sure, they could have offered greater compatibility, but given the requirements for the format and the supported player, the lack of multi-browser compatibility won't likely affect most users. |
| #5 By 8273 (131.107.3.74) at 7/22/2003 8:03:29 PM |
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Apple builds a service that requires you to use their web browser, their media software, their computer hardware, their portable music player, and nobody gives it a second thought. A third party company builds a web site that requires a Microsoft web browser, and any device that plays WMA (which there are hundreds of as compared to one) and everybody has a fit.
Oh, that is right, this is the anti-MS crowd, no logic necessary. |
| #6 By 1896 (66.20.202.235) at 7/22/2003 9:49:08 PM |
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#11
"No, it's necessary to make sure you don't go sharing your purchased music with every Tom, Dick and Harry out there." How? That will make them a success or a failure. |
| #7 By 9589 (66.57.63.97) at 7/22/2003 11:44:49 PM |
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i agree with #2 - mooresa56. Our web sites are accessed by tens of thousands of users a day and our web stats indicate that all browsers other than IE account for less than 1% of our users.
For my money, the standard is IE. As far as I am concerned, everyone, including the W3 whatever needs to adopt IE as the standard. Our VP of programming has walked around in a funk for days because he and his team can't get the other "browsers" to look great like IE as we roll out a new web based product. He has been putting several expletive deletives in front of these so-called standards based "browsers" lately. Its not pretty! You'll never get the Linux loving tech media crowd to ask for an accounting, but my guess is that all tolled billions are being spend by corporations just like mine to ensure that these fringe browsers can render our web sites properly. What a waste of resources! |
| #8 By 2332 (65.221.182.2) at 7/23/2003 12:24:47 AM |
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Yawn. Not an issue.
Next. |
| #9 By 3653 (209.149.57.116) at 7/23/2003 12:25:25 AM |
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JWM - "Microsoft is going to have a monopoly on the internet"
Dont be so melodramatic. You guys were saying this back in the mid to late nineties... yet MIRACULOUSLY I can still browse over to Amazon.com, ebay.com, hell... every friggan site that I've always gone to. Your "sky is falling" remarks were off-base then, and now that history can be used as a guide... your remarks can be better classified as "misleading". montanagrizzly - point taken. But I would argue that the fun has slowed... not due to consolidation around IE... but rather because the internet is a bit more mature now. There aren't quite as many people starting a wizbang company in their basements... relying on the fresh new BLINK tag to set their site/endeavor apart from the crowd. |
| #10 By 9589 (66.57.63.97) at 7/23/2003 1:30:30 AM |
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Our "philosphy" is to code commensurate with its return to our bottom line.
Our customers demand accurate yet flexible web based products. When they are paying a montly fee or are being "comp'd" because of their contribution to that bottom line, we deliver. The problem with the so-called standards based browsers are they are difficult to code to the preciseness that is available in IE not the opposite. |
| #11 By 14326 (216.75.223.70) at 7/23/2003 11:18:37 AM |
| nice post, #17 |
| #12 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 7/23/2003 1:52:38 PM |
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It is very interesting that precious little was said about iTunes being Mac-only, but the media attention was glowing. Buy.com launches something that is significantly more compatible with the computing world, and *that* "raises the ire of standards advocates"? Sounds like sour grapes/anti-MS sentiment more than anything else.
The W3C may set the de jure standards, but IE is the de facto standard. |
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