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Sony, MS to Join Forces Against iPod

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

January 6, 2005, 5:17 PM

Sony and Microsoft may join forces in an attempt to break Apple's dominance in digital music, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Bill Gates said that leveling the playing field carries "a lot of incentive to work together" in digital-music "infrastructure." Apple currently holds 87 percent of the market, according to research firm NPD.

While nothing specific was mentioned on a deal between Sony and MS, Gates said iTunes' resistance to allow its music to play on anything other than iPods meant that consumers needed more of a choice. Apple was sued earlier in the week by a California man who said he was "forced" to buy an iPod in order to play his purchased music on a portable player.

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By VikingBlade

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 10:37 AM

Would be good to see a more potent competitor.
(points at results of processor & graphics war)

Score: 0

By LostProphet

posted Jan 6, 2005 - 9:04 PM

Bill Gates it just crying cause there is something in the digtial world / pc market that he is not #1 in.

Score: 0

By Portal3

posted Jan 6, 2005 - 11:50 PM

Your either backing Apples continued excellence in software development (sarcasm) or your just another anti-Bill-Gates fanatic.
So, Apple is selling mp3 players with limited capabilities for a few hundred dollars. Putting Sony with it's creditable participation in the music arena and Microsoft with it's well known domination in the computer industry I'd hardly see why Bill Gates would need to cry.
If your going to have some hardware compatible with Windows then MS would surely be best suited for the job. MS+Sony put together could probably produce a media player with more format supports than any with the hardware to put it into your ears at the best quality.
"Cry Baby!" we'll see who's crying when the best wins out in the market.

Score: 0

By shicaca

posted Jan 9, 2005 - 3:01 AM

God ain't that the truth. 1/2 the functionality of the iPod is useless b/c they spent so little time trying to port it correctly over to the Windows platform.
Things to do? Yeah ... can't use it what-so-ever. It even says it's not compatible with the iPod unless you use a Mac.

Calendar? -- You have to use their sh*t iCal files, which my Outlook doesn't support natively.

Contacts? -- The instructions (drag and drop) create files that the iPod doesn't recognize, and in order to create a vcard for the contacts you have to do it one-by-one. I have 40 contacts, and I am *not* doing that... not to mention it's a pain in the a** to try to update something on there if need be.

ONE WORD APPLE: INTEGRATION... Learn it, PLEASE!

Score: 0

By vipercorp

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 4:15 AM

What a second, you're being just like him, bashing on Apple. Look in the mirror and think about what you're saying.

I love all technology (Windows/Linux/OSX - Apple/Dell/IBM/ etc...). It's all good. There is good and bad, with anything you got.

I assume you're a big time Microsoft person. Tell me, that there is nothing in Windows that needs to be changed or improved upon. Ya, thought so.

You think I'm being a jerk, I know. I'm not. I just have a very open mind and don't want to live with hate in my heart.

Boy, I wish BetaNews would get rid of the comment functionality thing. I read these articles and my experience gets destroyed, by negative people like you.

Score: 0

By Portal3

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 4:56 AM

First you say that I'm anti-Apple by implying that MS might know a bit more than Apple about software development; then you go on to say you love "Windows/Linux/OSX - Apple/Dell/IBM/". To top it off you then bag Windows. 'Jerk', no. 'Hypocrite', yes.
Just thought I'd point out this: 27,000 mp3s can easily fit on a 40GB portable mp3 player made by Sony; @ roughly $1 per track that's only $27,000 to fill up your $200-400 mp3 player; and other 'music' distributers are even adopting P2P as a means of selling mp3s. Well, it's nice to know that Sony can both endorse and condone such activities. Atleast this way they're making hardware to lure people into buying and then the user has to spend $27,000 to fill up the player or fork up over $50,000 in fines.

Score: 0

By mrmagoo

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 3:23 AM

I bet they won't include ogg... Then it's an automatic pass.

Score: 0

By ghammer

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 8:30 AM

Good. No .ogg!

Nobody except a few lunatics/fanatics cares about .ogg

Ask your mommy to allow you to stay out past 8 PM sometime and you'll see that the world does not need .ogg files to live.

You don't want quality music? Cool. I don't want stupid formats shoved down my throat by fanbois...

Score: 0

By JudahGabriel

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 10:48 AM

Amen, ghammer.

You know, you've gotta love the two-faced Janus beast that is the open source community. They love to complain about choice, freedom, competition and vendor lock-in. That is, until the said vendor is someone other than Microsoft.

Apple? Ooooh now we've got vendor lock-in and anti-competitive practices from Apple, and what do we hear from the open source crowd? A vehement defense! Oooooh the double-faced, hypocritical nature of this situation by the OSS crowd is almost too much to bear.

Score: 0

By LostProphet

posted Jan 9, 2005 - 9:02 PM

Man did not relize i would spark such a huge responce. 1st thing as to the comment where i either support apple or I hate bill gates neither is actually true. I do like all OS formats, both have there +'s and -'s. My comment is aimed towards that bill see's apple with a lock on a huge market and he is getting his butt spanked in it. To everyone that whines that the IPOD has compatible issues with windows well yea its going to, apple produces there product to match and work with there own product MAC. Do you see microsoft going out of its way to produce everything to work with MAC, NOPE microsoft builds it products to be most efficent with its own OS.

Score: 0

By DJOmegaRush

posted Jan 7, 2005 - 8:34 PM

Stop the fussing and check out my post here.
http://www.betanews.com/...iTunes/1104986626#52455

Score: 0

By MarvinK

posted Jan 10, 2005 - 1:38 PM

vCard export one-by-one is a Microsoft limitation. Lots of contact programs will let you export a single vCard that contains all of your contacts--and then you can import that into other applications as multiple contacts. I agree that Apple needs to play nicer with others (they'd probably be bigger than Microsoft if they would've figured that out 20 years ago), but Microsoft could have better vCard support.

Also, I don't know if Apple supports those multiple-contact vCards either... so it may be a moot point.

Score: 0

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