Early morning tech: RealNetworks Inc. has against a New York-based spamming ring allegedly responsible for sending billions of illegal and deceptive e-mail messages.
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First of all, Real did not win the marketplace not because MS controlled it, it is because Real sucked. It was selling consumer data, it installed bunch of c*** on your PC despite you telling it not too, its constant pop-up was annoying, its web interface is hard to navigate, its constant begging for your credit card number etc. The suit has aboslutely no merit.
As for the first poster, it is apparently a kid with no schooling about basic business practices. Every company sells the console at a loss. Xbox is not as big success for a number of reasons. It being owned by Microsoft has very little to do with it, my little knee-jerk reaction fellow Mac user.
Me thinks Wal-Mart will be disappointed, along with users of it's music purchase site.
Two things (aside from drowning out competitors) make the Wal-Mart stores successful: price and convenience. Convenience comes from the ability to buy virtually anything in one store.
Likewise, convenience is the ability to buy and play your music in one application, a la iTunes. I haven't (and won't) purchase any music from the Wal-Mart music store, but having to download the music with a web browser (which is, despite ubiquity, a terrible mechanism for online shopping) and then play in another application sounds cumbersome. It looks like Musicmatch and Napster are the only players other than Apple to recognize this fact.
Look at it this way: If price were the only factor in selecting a music source, none of the music stores would have any chance at all, since there remains a free (albeit illegal) source out there. Apple will, once again, win on ease of use.
Why did Napster, BuyMusic, MusicMatch all make the same mistake... by only releasing there stores to windows customers -- the same customers who don't pay for music also don't pay for software.
If they had released there store's to the Mac community they would have customers who value purchasing products and pay for solutions when they arrive to market.
WMA is going to win over AAC or MP3 with the onslaught of companies picking it over and over again. WMA will lead in time over MP3 -- why it will is the same old problem that was never solved with the Anti-trust case with MS.
Folks -- just keep thinking about fairness... and ask why MS has recently discontinued for PC or Mac upcoming versions of Outlook Express and MS Explorer -- they gave it away to dominate. WMP 9 is the same thing... they will give it away till they dominate then retrieve to a Windows only Model.
Beware of choice and the causality of that choice!
was losing out to mp3 which was the standard and adopted by most of the big boys (sony, etc). this pissed off ms so they made wma and shortly after initially said mp3's would not play on it and then later said it would play but the sound would be bad. this is all in their design to dominate, lock out the competition or make it not work and rule by default. they did it to dr-dos, to wordperfect, the list is endless.
Are they going to censor all their music like they do in their retail stores?
The walmart music web site says this : "Note: Music downloads from Walmart.com will not play on any Apple Macintosh computer."
The files are in WMA format, and the mac version of Microsoft's own Windows Media Player plays them just fine. Why are they lying to their customers and cutting off tens of millions of potential Mac customers? Not that I'd choose Walmart over the iTunes solution but I mean...c'mon!
This is such an evil company to begin with... any moral person familiar with their business practices would have nothing to do them, online or at a brick-and-mortar store. Meanwhile, their sales constitute 2% of the GDP for Mexico, and almost as much for the US. It's freakin' sickening. Anyway, if they 11 cents is a compelling reason to buy a song from them instead of elsewhere, they've totally lost it.
"I bought a new computer. Can I transfer music downloads from Walmart.com to this new computer?
WMA files protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption cannot be transferred from computer to computer. If you want to play music you downloaded from Walmart.com on another computer (or on any other device that plays audio CDs), you must burn your music onto an audio CD to play it (please note that you may burn a song to a CD up to 10 times)."
Do they think consumers will accept these restrictions? I wouldn't.
People shop at Wal-Mart for price not quality or choice. They'll accept the DRM stuff and when the can't transfer the music they go buy CDs and never buy downloaded music again.
Doesn't Wal-Mart sell Lindows PC's? This music will not play on those will it (I know you cn rip it to a CD and play it)?
One other thing I noticed. Is it possible to buy an album with one click without having to select each song on that album? I couldn't find if I could.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2001
agree.
I totally agree that MIcrosoft has illegally used its power as a monopoly to control the digital media market. MIcrosoft can use its power to even force their way into any market they desire... i.e. gaming with their XBox. MIcrosoft has the money to buy game developers so they can write games for their console. MIcrosoft is even loosing money on the blasted thing... gearing up for XBox 2 (which I hear will use a PPC processor like the GameCube). Kinda like handing out free (in this case discounted) samples of candy so you will buy more. h***, I bet MIcrosoft could even get into the automobile industry if they wanted. (but I wouldn't want one for the fear of it crashing!). Oh yeah, there's a typo in the news post.