Microsoft scandals and disbelief
2003-Feb-07, Friday 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ssurgulI caught myself in a background thread this week, while puttering away with code. It struck me as very scary, really.
Why bother with a MP3 player that doesn't support WMA?
Pro: Support for the two biggest media sources on the market. Thus ensuring that if WMA proves to be superior for compression retention vs. size, you can easily rerip to that.
Con: Most ink on the subject says that WMA isn't all that great. Plus it'll take that much longer to get all my music (of which I do have a sizeable quantity) back into WMA.
Pro: Most new electronics are coming out with support for both de facto. Even some of the new DVD players seem to be able to handle that media as well.
Con: All my current electronics support MP3 already, so who gives a shit about it, as long as the MP3 standard is supported down the road.
Pro: It's fairly likely that MPEG will do something insanely stupid and license the format and the encoding tools to a price point that will be prohibitive for all but larger companies to support. WMA, on the other hand, is free.
Con: ...
WTF? (Que Sheila B.) WHATwhatWHAT???!? (Thanks, Sheila. Can Kyle come out to see a foreign film, from Canada?) Has MS so truly taken over everything that even with the advent of things such as the Ogg-Vorbis standard, free and relatively comparable to MP3, that I've already conceded that Uncle Bill's Empire (c) will still take over everything? I realized that I pretty much had done just that.
And yet again I was forced to realize that their substandard garbage they refer to as a 'standard' will quite likely slowly creep into the mainstream until ultimately it becomes the final note, unseated only by litigation. Not that I've actually tried the WMA format yet. But, from chatting with a few others, here and there, it seems that that standard just isn't what it's hyped to be from MS. What a surprise. And, yet, people who are just casual users will use and use it, more and more. Thanks to XP. I am truly in love with the integrations there, don't misunderstand. The photo copy/mod wizard is wonderful, as are several of the other little enhancements to usability. But Media Player will rip into WMA for you. The average user has the attention span of a gnat, and won't bother to recall the evils that were brought up in the anti-trust suit. They'll just go for it, and move blithely into the road of proprietary bullshit, as always.
WTF. And I can't really criticize too much, as I'm doing the same thing by supporting the platform as well, and praising some of those very same integrations that are locking MS back into a position of market place dominance. If only he weren't such an asshole about things, it'd be a lot easier to accept his marketing ploys.
Why bother with a MP3 player that doesn't support WMA?
Pro: Support for the two biggest media sources on the market. Thus ensuring that if WMA proves to be superior for compression retention vs. size, you can easily rerip to that.
Con: Most ink on the subject says that WMA isn't all that great. Plus it'll take that much longer to get all my music (of which I do have a sizeable quantity) back into WMA.
Pro: Most new electronics are coming out with support for both de facto. Even some of the new DVD players seem to be able to handle that media as well.
Con: All my current electronics support MP3 already, so who gives a shit about it, as long as the MP3 standard is supported down the road.
Pro: It's fairly likely that MPEG will do something insanely stupid and license the format and the encoding tools to a price point that will be prohibitive for all but larger companies to support. WMA, on the other hand, is free.
Con: ...
WTF? (Que Sheila B.) WHATwhatWHAT???!? (Thanks, Sheila. Can Kyle come out to see a foreign film, from Canada?) Has MS so truly taken over everything that even with the advent of things such as the Ogg-Vorbis standard, free and relatively comparable to MP3, that I've already conceded that Uncle Bill's Empire (c) will still take over everything? I realized that I pretty much had done just that.
And yet again I was forced to realize that their substandard garbage they refer to as a 'standard' will quite likely slowly creep into the mainstream until ultimately it becomes the final note, unseated only by litigation. Not that I've actually tried the WMA format yet. But, from chatting with a few others, here and there, it seems that that standard just isn't what it's hyped to be from MS. What a surprise. And, yet, people who are just casual users will use and use it, more and more. Thanks to XP. I am truly in love with the integrations there, don't misunderstand. The photo copy/mod wizard is wonderful, as are several of the other little enhancements to usability. But Media Player will rip into WMA for you. The average user has the attention span of a gnat, and won't bother to recall the evils that were brought up in the anti-trust suit. They'll just go for it, and move blithely into the road of proprietary bullshit, as always.
WTF. And I can't really criticize too much, as I'm doing the same thing by supporting the platform as well, and praising some of those very same integrations that are locking MS back into a position of market place dominance. If only he weren't such an asshole about things, it'd be a lot easier to accept his marketing ploys.
