“The overwhelming success of the iPod — which now accounts for about 75% of the 22 million personal music players that have been bought over the last couple of years — is putting well-deserved heat on Microsoft to tune up its much-touted, but now outdated, Microsoft Media Player,” Mike Wendland writes for The Detroit Free Press.
“In a move that Apple boss Steve Jobs claims will take the radio-like downloadable programs called podcasts mainstream, Apple made it easier this week for iPod users to subscribe to their favorite podcasts and have the latest editions automatically available for listening each day,” Wendland writes. “Apple did it through a free update to its iTunes music software, which made thousands of podcasts available for free through the iTunes Music Store.”
“Microsoft’s Media Player — the hallmark of Bill Gates’ plan to record, play and distribute all forms of digital music and video through the Windows operating system — has no such podcast support,” Wendland writes. “And that has a lot of users steamed, especially those who bought rival music players under the Microsoft PlaysForSure marketing slogan and can’t figure out why their iRiver or Rio or Mojo players can’t get podcasts nearly as easily as iPods now can.”
“That doesn’t mean that users of rival music players can’t listen to podcasts. They can. It’s just a lot more cumbersome to get them downloaded to the computer and then transferred to the player,” Wendland writes. “And rival users can forget about going to the iTunes Web site (http://www.itunes.com), perusing the huge directory of podcasts, and then just going to the podcast’s Web site to download the program. Apple has cleverly — some say malevolently — taken great pains to hide the direct link so non-iPod users can see them but not get them.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft sucks. What else is new? 
