By Ina Fried, 3 September 2004 09:20
NEWS Apple is making catcalls over Microsoft's musical talents.
The creator of the trendsetting iPod music player and iTunes music service took its on-again-off-again rival to task for the new MSN Music download service, saying it has fewer features and fewer songs than the market-leading iTunes.
"Its biggest problem may be that its downloaded songs can not play on the iPod," said Eddie Cue, Apple's vice president of applications.
Apple has a strong, early lead, having been in the business for more than a year, having sold more than 125 million songs and having established a dominant share of the player market with its iPod.
But Microsoft may have some advantages, in addition to its sheer mass.
Where Apple has concentrated on music, Microsoft is giving nearly equal weight to video. The software giant is pushing a new category of devices, dubbed Portable Media Centers, that play TV shows and video in addition to songs. The products, which use Microsoft technology, are sold by consumer electronics firms such as Samsung and Creative Technology.
And while Apple has taken an exclusively sales-oriented approach, Microsoft has also developed technology that allows people to "rent" music through a subscription service. However, the MSN Music store, which opened Wednesday, only matches Apple on the typical price per song, at 99 cents.
Executives at Apple continue to downplay the importance of both music subscriptions and portable video. "The video market isn't really something that customers have shown an affinity to," said Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware marketing at the company.
Pointing to the past generation of devices, Joswiak noted that Sony has sold 200 million of its Walkman music players and not very many "Watchman" portable TVs.
Both Apple and Microsoft have been dialling up the rhetoric. In an interview this week with BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates rejected the notion promoted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that portable video isn't important.
"Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, 'Hey, would you like to have your videos there?' My kids would," Gates said. "I guess Steve's kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch Finding Nemo. I don't know who made that, but it's really a neat movie."
In that interview, Gates stressed that Microsoft's approach is to offer a variety of music services and digital players, but noted there is probably room in the market for both Apple- and Microsoft-based products.
Apple focused much of its attack on the MSN Music store, rather than Microsoft's overall approach.
"The iTunes Music Store is currently selling over 16 million songs per month [a rate of 200 million songs per year]," the company said in a statement. "How many songs will Microsoft's new online music store sell during its first month?"
While it's debatable whether the MSN Music store can single-handedly dethrone Apple in the near term, the bigger question is whether Apple will be able to maintain its current lead - claiming 70 per cent of legal music downloads and roughly half of the US digital music player business.
"Our job of course is to continue to make that so," Joswiak said.
Joswiak noted that the company is not standing still, having added to the iPod lineup with the mini version and reaching partnerships with Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and BMW.
Apple plans next month to expand its music store from a few European countries to the rest of the continent and sees opportunities beyond that.
"The wonderful thing is that everyone on the planet likes some kind of music," Cue said. "There is a huge opportunity [to sell music] in every country, including developing markets."
Cue said that, at least so far, Microsoft's strategy of enabling many partners and trying to create a larger ecosystem hasn't worked. "It kind of put them in a position of having to open" their own store, Cue said.
As for the fact that songs bought at MSN Music don't play on the iPod, Microsoft places the blame on Apple.
"We're sorry that this isn't easier - unfortunately Apple refuses to allow other companies to integrate with the iPod's proprietary music format," Microsoft states on its site. "If you are an iPod owner already and unhappy about this policy, you are welcome to send feedback to Apple requesting that they change their interoperability policy."
On the site, Microsoft also outlines a rather cumbersome workaround that entails burning a purchased song onto a CD and then using iTunes to rip the song from the CD into an iPod-compatible format.
Ina Fried writes for CNET News.com
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. Rob Buckley
"We're sorry that this isn't easier - unfortunately Apple refuses to allow other companies to integrate with the iPod's proprietary music format"
What format would that be then? Would that be MP3? No. WAV? No. AIFF? No. AAC? No. Audible? No. These are all open or other companies' formats (WAV was created by Microsoft), yet the iPod can play them.
What Microsoft means is that the iPod can't play Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio files (WMA) that include _its_ proprietary digital rights management protection (iTunes for Windows can covert unprotected WMA files into AAC files).
Kind of the pot calling the kettle black really.
2. Mark SPLINTER
i know someone with a big DVD collection who will soon look as stupid as the guy with the big VHS collection.
Is all this new technology to reward a)artists b)consumers c)big business
hmmm let's think....
3. Tim Servinsky
I sold my iPod because it couldn't play WMV's. It's unacceptable. I have a cd player in my car that plays wmv's and mp3's. Clearly the wmv's are smaller, so I burn cd's in that format. Now with the iPod, I have to keep my music in TWO formats if I want to fit more music on my cd's. (The iTrip does not work, so don't even offer that as an alternative. If you live in a major metro area, those devices do nothing...) The bottom line, until CD players play AAC or iPods play WMV, I'll stick with microsoft. (It should also be noted that I'm typing this on my Powerbook. I'm not anti-Apple, but think Apple needs to do a better job integrating in a Windows world. Just a fact of life...)
4. eric weber
Right on Rob. It's all in the way you want to spin. Microsoft is the 800 pound pink elephant in this case. They stick out like a sore thumb that can't operate an apple click wheel.