“Don’t you hate it when a band covers your favorite song with a new version that’s inferior to the original? Microsoft’s new music service, MSN Music, which makes its debut in mid-October, is not nearly as bad as, say, William Shatner covering the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” but it’s no Apple iTunes Music Store either,” Peter Lewis writes for Fortune.
MacDailyNews Take: So far, so good. But, later in his article, Lewis gets downright perplexing and totally confusing.
Lewis writes, “Windows Media Player 10, in contrast, is Exhibit W of the Microsoft ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ school of software development. Windows Media Player 9 was so anemic that it was often referred to as WiMP 9, but version 10 is much more robust. Unlike Apple’s iTunes, WMP 10 is truly a media player, capable of displaying music videos, album art, film clips, and photos as well as managing song libraries and radio stations.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Weird, huh? We fired up iTunes just to make sure we weren’t hallucinating. Apple’s iTunes displayed music videos, album art, film clips, photos and allowed us to manage our song libraries and radio stations. Does Lewis know that Microsoft has already admitted that they tried hard to copy Apple’s iTunes? Does Lewis understand that the world’s first and most robust media platform, Apple’s QuickTime (the one Microsoft also copied for WMP), is the underlying technology that powers iTunes? We still cannot believe that the normally thorough Lewis wrote this and that Fortune is publishing it. Are you a flabbergasted as us? If, for some reason, Lewis meant to distinguish WMP as a “pure media player” unlike iTunes, he should have made it clear that every single one of his list of WMP features are also included in iTunes and that Apple did it first, as usual. Perhaps an editor mangled the sentence structure, so that its meaning is not what Lewis originally intended? We’re very confused. Fortune’s readers will be, too – most without knowing what’s wrong with this article. In the hope that this can be fixed or explained: Lewis’ email at Fortune is plewis@fortunemail.com
What a dork!
He must have been smoking while writing the article.
when they say view videos and photos, i think they are referring to using Windows Media Player as a DVD player as opposed to just music videos.
Un-f’ing-believable what passes for journalism these days, huh? Oh, and by the way, my iTunes also plays movie trailers, not just music videos.
How do you play movies in iTunes? Not the online trailers, I’m talking about movies or clips on your hard drive. And how do you view photos in iTunes? I don’t think you can, which is good, I like having separate applications, but I’m not sure what MDN is referring to.
Nobody researches jack squat anymore, they just push whatever agenda they have. Then when it blows up in their face they think they can just say “I’m Sorry” and it’ll all go away. Compared to RAthER this is nothing, but people seriously need to be held accountable for the “news” they report.
iTMS is not a media player. We have separate apps for different media. So while iTMS uses quicktime, and can play videos on the store, you can’t store video in your library and get it to play that. iTunes is not about media, it is about music.
We have Quicktime player for watching clips and DVD player for watching DVDs. We have iPhoto for looking at photos.
So OS-X is BEHIND WMP in that it’s up to the user to organise his video files. It’s not a big problem, but perhaps something Apple can address. It’s not something that really needs to be addressed in a hurry though, because people have tens of video files versus thousands of songs and photos. I have my video nicely organised in the Movies folder.
So it’s behind in an area that simply doesn’t matter (yet).
It’s likely IMO that XP sucks at proper multi-tasking, so to have four open apps for us is no problem, but on XP, it’s better to have one app to do many things, becasue it cuts down on thrashing the system.
Yes WMP is the jack of all trades, master of none..
Cool name , though..
Seriously, what has this guy said other than.. WMP plays movie files, views pictures and plays music?
And why on earth is that a good thing.. Convergence sucks.. WMP is perfect example of Microsoft’s idea of innovation:
Com’pro’mise
“So OS-X is BEHIND WMP in that it’s up to the user to organise his video files. It’s not a big problem, but perhaps something Apple can address.”
THank god apple doesn’t listen to you!
You should use a Mac sometime.. having separate Apps rocks.. you can update them separately and the UI is not compromised (If you think WMP UI is fine.. then you will go into convulsions when you see iTunes, or iPhoto)
two words…
crack head!!!
JB:
Seems that a significant number of reporters and analysts went the the “Dan Rather School of Journalism” after failing out of the “Norman Bates School of Motel Management”.
mike – didn’t you read what I’d written ?
Is there anything that’s actually untrue in what I’ve said ?
As for using a mac sometime, I use one every day. I have a G5 2x2Ghz that I ordered on the day they were announced. I hac an iPod that I bought on they day they were released. I have a cinema display. I use a one button mouse. I have Final Cut Pro.
I told someone today that the Star Wars DVD they’d ordered were remastered on a cluster of 600 macs.
You don’t have/know that without being a bit overboard on Apple.
IF you read carefully, I’m having a dig a windows. One of the few places they have an edge is organising a few video files. Imagine how stupid someone would be for not switching while citing the reason as being “OS-X Sux. I can’t organise my 37 video files in iTunes.”
Sigh.
just one word describes that crappy “media” thingy Billy Gates makes…
and that word is “Rebuffering”…..
while I dont really care what its doing every time i see that annoying word…. I do know that when I use QuickTime for streaming….
I never see “rebuffering”….
great point about compromising the UI like WMP does.
with iPhoto, iTunes, Quicktime, etc you can have very robust applications. if they stuck all that in iTunes, you would greatly compromist the UI, and in a digital media world, who wants that?
A: Windoze users.
E-mail sent.
Bill Gates faces an enormous dilemma every day, to market products that are just as good as Apple�s without being soundly chastised for copying what Apple has developed.
The problem is, however, Apple�s products reflect �convergence� of design, functionality, and elegance. So Gates is left to build his Frankenstein monsters as piece meal projects or as bastards of invention and we can see the final results: vaporware (Longhorn), insecure ware (IE and XP), and irrelevant ware (Portable Media Center).
“IF you read carefully, I’m having a dig a windows. One of the few places they have an edge is organising a few video files. Imagine how stupid someone would be for not switching while citing the reason as being “OS-X Sux. I can’t organise my 37 video files in iTunes.”
Apple has thusfar not acknowledged the market (ahem.. Acquisition) for movies. iMovie is great for creating movies… but Apple’s “who wants to watch a movie on an eMac” policy means there is no Movie Management software.
While the iPod has flourished on the backbone of filesharing for music, the movie market isn’t the same…As for buying movies online in some cruddy format like AVI … and needing a place to organize all that stuff.. erm.. not quite mainstream yet.
You’d like a Quicktime drawer to organize your stolen movies huh… Well at least there’s a Movies section in every single Finder window in Panther. That might be a nice place for the average frustrated Win/Switcher to start putting his/her movies…
Create a movie in iMovie and it will end up there. Zany.
Whenever I see it, “WMP” always reads as “Wimp”.
DON’T START BOMBARDING THE JERK WITH E-MAIL. YOU WILL LOOK LIKE FOOLS I TELL YA! FOOLS!
Well, the biggest issue Apple has to adress when it comes to watching movies, is built in full screen playback. People don’t watch their movies in small windows. And paying $30 just to be able to watch it full screen?!?! At this area, WMP is superior. (And of course I know that there are free alternatives, among them my favourite VLC, but this SHOULD be free in QuickTime!)
Apple is not “behind” WMP, they just have a different approach.
Microsoft developed WMP as a do it all program.
Apple have the iLife suite of Applications that work seamlessly together – end of story.
This is a bit of a beat up storywise. I wish MacDaily News didn’t view every report concerning Macs as a thinly veiled attack on the platform.
Regarding the inclusion of the email addresses of article writers for readers to contact, I feel MDN should discontinue this practise. It paints Mac users in a very poor light.
I think plewis has run scared . . . plewis@fortunemail.com is not working.
Mike – You just don’t seem to be able to understand what I’m saying
We seem to be talking at cross purposes.
I do believe that we’re actually in agreement, but you seem to be so angry about something that you’ve failed to understand the first post (OK, I wasn’t quite as clear as I could have been), but then you’ve failed to understand the explanation too.
I’ll try one last time.
WMP can organise movie clips.
No bundled OS-X app does this.
The obvious assumption is that OS-X is deficient. WMP is somehow better.
BUT….
You said : “Apple has thusfar not acknowledged the market (ahem.. Acquisition) for movies. iMovie is great for creating movies… but Apple’s “who wants to watch a movie on an eMac” policy means there is no Movie Management software.”
I said: “So it’s behind in an area that simply doesn’t matter (yet).”
(so we agree)
AND…
“there’s a Movies section in every single Finder window in Panther”
I said: ” It’s not something that really needs to be addressed in a hurry though, because people have tens of video files versus thousands of songs and photos. I have my video nicely organised in the Movies folder.
“
(so we agree).
As for stolen movies, I have precisely none. I do have 79 video clips nicely organised in my movies folder though and easy to access in subfolders with column view.
” I do have 79 video clips nicely organised in my movies folder though and easy to access in subfolders with column view.”
And you either stole them from filesharing or created them yourself..
If you stole them, then the Finder is perfect.. if you created them, they’re in the Finder already..
You want integration into one of the iLife apps. iMovie perhaps? Why… you have the finder.. you’re not making playlists with the movies, you just play one at a time, per sitting…
You want integration with Quicktime, like a drawer, like in Preview? Why? so you can scroll through 79 screenshots to find your file.
Until you can find the problem, don’t expect it to be solved anytime soon… MS integrates Windows Explorer clumsily into WMP… I don’t see that as particularly clever.
Let me know when you decide what the actual problem is with the Open Movie… item in the Quicktime menu that you want WMP-like redundant navigation.
Hey Mike go easy on Hywel. He was making some good points as were you and the differences are pretty minor.
For the sake of argument (not!) one could envisage it being useful (e.g. to families, academics, advertising folks) to organise ones video files, and while the Finder/Quicktime player combo is the low end way to do it one can’t easily access meta data like one can on music in iTunes e.g. subject name, description, video parameters, etc.
It would not have to be a very complex application, in the same sense that much of iTunes is a database application with Quicktime technology underpinnings. There may be a small niche at present, and the future Finder in future OS X releases may have better meta data capabilities that it may not be necessary. It probably could be built via scripting language and even available in Dashboard. The main work would be done by Quicktime.
I think the heat generated by this discussion is unnecessary (except to warm our respective cockles!) and the main comparison is really between the Windows Media Player technology and Quicktime … comparing to iTunes is barking up the wrong tree without a paddle! 😎