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Microsoft, again: Apple's old nemesis | |
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| Time: 00:00 EST/05:00 GMT | News Source: News.com | Posted By: Todd Richardson | ||
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In a masterstroke of technological and marketing acumen, Apple Computer appeared to have seized the digital music industry last month by boldly creating its own retail download service.
The Macintosh maker, diagnosed being near death in the 1990s, seemed to have pulled off another miracle: Its iTunes Music Store sold 2 million songs in its first 16 days, dwarfing rival download services and drawing raves from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Yet even before the initial euphoria could subside, the company began hearing familiar rumblings from points north--namely, Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
"We've been working and have gotten a lot of traction in this space for a long while," said David Caulton, group manager for the Windows Media division, adding that Microsoft has no plans for a competing service. "We're still very comfortable with the strategy of enabling lots and lots of partners to build these things, rather than build a closed proprietary service on our own."
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| #1 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 5/30/2003 1:31:03 PM |
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"How many in the next 16?"
1 million in the next 12 days. 3 million in 28 days (1 mil in 6 days, 1 mil in 10 days, 1 mil in 12 days.) "the sneaky Steve Jobs at Apple degraded the iTunes software on peoples machines without asking." No, Apple patched a hack. The Rendezvous sharing feature is still available, works as intended, and is quite impressive. "ITunes users are divided over the changes, but some people have been heavily critical." Strange, this "hack" required a web interface to provide a directory--the three sites which built this voluntary removed their directories before this patch was released. |
| #2 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 5/30/2003 5:09:26 PM |
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"Reference? I am curious." Jesus, parker, look it up yourself. There are PRs for the one and two million, and there's a NYT article and a couple of others within the last couple of days referring to the three million mark.
"Of course, even with your numbers this implies a very high rate of diminishing returns because of the fixed cost of the infrastructure." They already own the infrastructure through the server farms they have developed for the QuickTime theatre which remains much more infrastructure intensive than iTMS. The significant cost for Apple was the actual digitizing of files and creation of the DB--a worthwhile investment in my mind. (And it isn't entirely known how much is being down by Apple and how much is being done by the studios.) "There are so few Apple users that eventually everyone will have bought the songs they want." That's a poor theory. I and many others haven't bought a single track yet but will... They add about 1000 tracks a day so by no means does the store include everything everyone would want already. A Windows version will be available in 6 months time etc... "Thats a big decline -- sales have dropped by 50% in less than 28 days." And it may have been a huge initial burst and it may continue at 500,000 a week for all we know. 500,000 a week would still crush most music services. "Friends could tell each other their IP address." No, you still needed some code to stream and locate streams beyond the LAN restriction of Rendezvous. There is not a magic dialog in iTunes where you drop in an IP and connect to any computer on the net. It wasn't just the directory that was provided by these web sites; there was programming behind the scenes that the average (even relatively savvy) user could not have accomplished. In fact, as far as I can tell, only two people successfully created code to do so (though very quickly), and again they have voluntarily withheld that information and pulled their work. Anyway, I have no interest in defending it. I just wanted to rebutt your misinformation and provide whatever info of interest to whoever. The suggestion that Apple is "crippling" iTunes (hell, that aren't even forcing the download--as the Reg points out, it would have been cake to block out users who didn't upgrade from using the store for example) or quickly falling off the radar isn't worth fighting over. It's a success thus far. This post was edited by sodajerk on Friday, May 30, 2003 at 17:44. |
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