“A good friend of mine recently sent me a 9-page argument for why he’s using Rhapsody rather than an iPod/iTunes, and why he’s sticking with Windows rather than trying out a Macintosh,” Leland Scott writes on the “Musings from Mars” blog. A quote from Scott’s friend:
It also appears to me that with the iPod and iTunes, Apple is engaging in just the kind of predatory behavior you accuse Microsoft of (i.e., refusing to license other manufacturers to produce players that play AAC songs). No surprise there; all corporations strive to be monopolists if they think they can get away with it. So far, Microsoft has simply been more successful.
“Now, where do you suppose my friend got this impression? It comes directly from the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) seeded by Microsoft and its minions who are trying to–but so far, thankfully, failing to–control the world’s digital music with a proprietary format called Windows Media Audio (WMA). An amazingly stupid example of this kind of FUD appears in a Time Magazine article this week called “Attack of the Anti-iPods” by someone called “Time Morrison.” (Do you think his/her first name is really “Time”? But that’s what it says here…) In this article, Ms./Mr. Morrison opens his/her analysis with a breezy reference to “the proprietary digital-music format that joins you at the hip to Apple’s iTunes online store” as one of the negatives of the iPod experience,” Scott writes.
“Now, I would have thought someone writing for Time magazine about digital music players would know better. In fact, it’s the fact that they don’t know better that makes me suspicious of their motives. Because, as a matter of fact, Apple does not have a proprietary digital-music format,” Scott writes. “The fact is that the company that has a proprietary digital music format is Microsoft, not Apple. Microsoft’s format is known as Windows Media Audio, or WMA. Unlike AAC, which is an industry standard not owned by a single company, WMA can only be licensed from Microsoft, and Microsoft alone gets the fees from that licensing. It costs developers nothing to license AAC for use in software products, and use of AAC as a consumer keeps you from once again tying your technological future to a single company–that is, Microsoft.”
In his article, Scott reminds us that “you don’t have to use the iTunes music store just because you have an iPod” and that he thinks that the “Time writer was being phony on other fronts as well. For example, the iPod can play many formats other than AAC–in fact, it can play virtually all industry-standard digital music formats.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Time Magazine pops iPod’s ‘pimples’ and examines ‘fetching’ new iPod ‘killers’ – April 04, 2005
The de facto standard for legal digital online music files: Apple’s protected MPEG-4 Audio (.m4p) – December 15, 2004