John Gruber dissects Microsoft's humerous digital music 'Q&A' with his usual excellent flair. As Apple was bringing their iTunes and Music Store MP3/AAC player to Windows, Microsoft hurried up and put out their own press release about choosing a digital music service for Windows. Naturally, it exalts Microsoft's own Windows Media format, which is understandable - Real would do the same about real media, and Apple would do the same about QuickTime. But Microsoft's document is especially funny as it exalts "choice" as being the driving factor behind why WMA based services are the better option. It's even funnier now that AAC, the MPEG4 audio codec (not proprietary to Apple) has an excellent player on Windows, and that Apple's AAC based DRM system is now on Windows as well.
Where's Windows Media 9 for Mac OS X? Nowhere, yet. So if I had a PC workstation (for example - big stretch of an example) and a Mac laptop, I couldn't buy a song from one of those other services and play it on my laptop. With iTunes Music Store, I could listen to it on both. Granted, Windows Media 9 is expected to be arriving this fall for Mac OS X. Here's hoping that Microsoft does a full port that is 100% compatible with Windows Media from, er, Windows. DRM and all. Then, they can talk to me about choice.
And who thinks that once Microsoft gets Windows Media established (as they seem to be doing) that they'll ditch it and let it die slowly like they've done to Internet Explorer? Time was that IE on Windows was the best browser around. But I still have yet to hear glowing reviews of IE 6, and it really seems to be falling behind the Mozilla and KHTML based browsers. And Microsoft has already said that they've effectively stopped upgrading it as a separate application - meaning that you will have to upgrade to the interim releases of Windows XP or wait for Longhorn to (possibly) see a better browser from them. How long until IE 6 becomes like Netscape 4.7 in the eyes of web developers, as "that dumb old thing we still have to support?"