With the recent announcement of HP to release its own brand of iPod products , Microsoft has got really angered as a result. A good portion of digital audio players on the market provide support for Microsoft's Windows Media format. HP being the leading PC manufacturer have decided to make a deal with Apple and went against Microsoft's format altogether. According to Microsoft, this is bad news as it would limit customers to Apple's audio codec and its iTunes music store thus losing customers away from music stores that use Microsoft's WMA format.
According to some sources, HP may even be doing a bad move as customers could start moving to WMA compatible devices at a later stage due to Windows being the market leader in operating systems. The main reason HP went for Apple over Microsoft was due to Apple's music store doing so well and it was easier to join Apple than trying to compete by starting up yet another music store. It may be likely that HP will later try to work with Apple on taking on WMA support for its player.
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General manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes' emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod. He told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: "Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services." Fester also said that HP would confuse its customers because the company supports several other Microsoft media products that are not compatible with the iPod, including its Windows Media Centre software. According to the New York Times, Dell also suggests HP is making a mistake. A Dell spokesman said: "We expect competition and it's good for customers. Over time, however, customers will want industry standard choices.'' HP believes that it is better positioned than any other company to bridge the gap between Apple and Windows. Fiorina told the Times: "The next big thing isn't the next gizmo or killer app or hot box. Customers want all this to work together and they want a seamless approach. We're very much going to make sure that the Microsoft and Apple worlds work together. That's part of the power we bring to this thing." Read the full article here. |
As the iPod is currently leading the market on digital audio players along with iTunes online store leading the market on online music purchases , it looks like Microsoft are losing badly when it comes to the music. Then again, Microsoft should be very happy that they are doing very well on other sales such as being the leading operating system, office package, web browser, streaming video codec, disk FAT system (which it tried introducing royalty charges on ) and so on. It is about time that Microsoft gets the experience of what it is like for a competitor to be doing better on something than themselves.
Finally, it is not clear how well HP's branded iPod will do if it is committing to enforce DRM restrictions on all of its products . Apple's iPod supports the MP3 codec along with nearly every other digital audio player device on the market. Should HP drop this codec due to it being incompatible with DRM technologies, this could be enough to make customers choose Apple's main iPod (or another player) over HP's version just to get MP3 support.
Source: Macworld Daily News
