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Microsoft exec, displeased with Creative and Dell, proposed iPod partnership
Frustrated by offerings from hardware partners Creative Technology and Dell, a Microsoft executive considered a partnership with Apple to bring Windows Media support to the iPod. In a 2003 internal email entiled “sucking on media players,” Windows chief Jim Allchin suggested he talk to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft’s software for fear the iPod would “drive people away from Windows Media Player.” The email is part of evidence in a civil antitrust trial against Microsoft in Iowa. “My goodness it’s terrible,” Allchin wrote about one of Creative’s devices. “What I don’t understand though is I was told the new Creative Labs device would be comparable to Apple. That is so not the case.”
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1
Actually, it’s Windows Media Player that’s driven people away from Windows Media Player.
Posted by bk on January 22, 2007 at 8:28 AM (PDT)
2
Absolutely.
Posted by the Godfather of User Interface Design on January 22, 2007 at 9:32 AM (PDT)
3
I’d much rather use WMP11 over iTunes 7 out of the two myself, except MS doesn’t make WMP11 for OS X so I have to use iTunes 7 on my MacBook.
Posted by David on January 22, 2007 at 11:11 AM (PDT)
4
I agree with the first comment. Besides the horrible UI, WMP supported only a handful of codecs. RealPlayer, for one, supports more than 60 codecs and protocols.
Posted by Galley on January 22, 2007 at 11:22 AM (PDT)
5
and winamp is still the best player out there. you don’t get much more freedom than with winamp whatever else you use.
Posted by Just me on January 22, 2007 at 11:42 AM (PDT)
6
As a mac server manager and long time ipod user, I still think that itunes is an awful piece of software, it is by no means on a par with other Apple offerings. Likewise I hate the way that RealPlayer tries to hijack your pc - maybe they learned from Miscrosoft ??
Posted by Simon on January 22, 2007 at 12:46 PM (PDT)
7
So they’re complaining about users abandoning WMP.
If WMP didn’t suck, supported RSS Audio Feeds and supported AAC and h.264, people might start using it.
iTunes for Windows also sucks, but it sucks much less that WMP and even supports converting WMA Audio to AAC!
Not even Zune uses WMP nowadays; It uses it’s own Media Library Management System, which is even worse than WMP
Posted by Dan Woods on January 22, 2007 at 12:58 PM (PDT)
8
No point making another comment on the quality of WMP (though I don’t hate it), but I know I personally don’t care for .mp4 and have a lot of my videos in .avi format. I still haven’t purchased a 5G iPod, but I’m considering one, and iPod compatibility for my .avi videos would be a huge deciding factor for me.
Posted by M. le Pod on January 22, 2007 at 3:22 PM (PDT)
9
Whatever drove people *towards* WMP in the first place…
Posted by Bad Beaver on January 23, 2007 at 12:04 AM (PDT)
10
Eww, WMA on iPods. Yuck. I refuse to use Windows Media codecs on principle.
Posted by Pikemann_Urge on January 23, 2007 at 2:37 AM (PDT)
11
I agree. With the whole year of having an iPod from Apple I’ve used iTunes and even got my best friend into using iTunes and he doesn’t even have an iPod. But he thanks me because everyone can have there own song and even listen to the one’s in the library. But yeah, I think that having WMA’s on the iPod is totally stupid.
Posted by musik4life89 on January 23, 2007 at 5:58 PM (PDT)
12
I personally like Windows 95 CD Player.
Posted by JW on January 25, 2007 at 2:09 PM (PDT)