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1. Comment - Microsoft Planning Own Music Player?

   (Feb 4, 2006 - 5:07 AM)

   Well the fact of the matter is that most people look at the two and say, "Ok, they both play music with as much functionality as on my cd player, but one is twice as thick."
   
   Seriously, if you can find the music in less than a few steps, all of which are nearly identical but just operating on different hierarchial levels, and you can start/stop/ff/rw the tracks, then what else do you NEED. You must consider that these extra features DO get in the way of the more essential ones, and that is why I think the iPod won. It wasn't a battle of features with the outcome determined by geeks, like the OS war is, it came down to which device was more useable, and consequentially desirable, by non-techy people.
   
   Another MAJOR part of the picture is obviously the software. This really is half the picture, at least. I consider myself very good with computers, I do about everything but code my own software or use different OS's (but I do know the trends in these areas, and I found it a lot easier to get music from cd or p2p onto an ipod than with WMP and some other device. The general steps are:
   1. Insert CD, rip - both programs do this well, but iTunes's configuration is more straightforward.
   2. Find the damn songs that have been imported. Winner-iTunes. The search box is very obviously placed and labeled, the additional browser panes are supperior to the tree-view used in WMP 10, making a playlist in iTunes is easier (just highlight and drag to the left).
   3. Add to the device. Winner, iTunes, but only for certain situations, otherwise it's a tie. For manually adding songs, iTunes is definitly more straightforward, drag and drop. For automatically syncing the whole library it's more of a tie.
   
   Additional areas where iTunes excels are:
   1. Display of present state of the program. iTunes lists everything the program is doing in the same place, whether it's playing a song, rippind music, burning a cd, or syncing an ipod. WMP has no such area, there's no single place you can look at to see what's going on. Indications might be in an icon's state (which you would never detect if you don't know whatit looked like before), in some empty space somewhere, in a sudden change of the view, in a popup (iTunes uses these too, but backs it up with the 'lcd' display), or even external from the program.
   2. Ease of finding files. I said this already but it's extremely important.
   3. Carefully selected features which encapsulate as much functionality as possible. One feature can do many things. Non-essential functionality is absent, but that is only a drawback for a few people, and their inclusion would be an annoyance to everyone else. This is Apple's philosophy, and it explains both why consumers like Apple yet big companies with highly heterogenous needs prefer non-Apple solutions. Apple is very good for certain things, and absolutly horrible at others, and music is not one of these areas.