From Russell: Napster, Real and Yahoo! vs. Apple… Winner: Microsoft. Sounds odd? Russell does a run-through of the various online music structures and shows that despite Apple dominating the hardware section of music players and iTunes doing very very well, the fact that Yahoo! and Real are using Redmond’s DRM plus a truckload more companies and that the XBox360 is going to be a games console and a media centre means that MS is gonna kick serious ass very soon. They’ll control the routes for accessing our media. Russell himself is a Yahoo! employee so he isn’t being biased on this.
Choice quotes:
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and soon they’ll have a monopoly on everything else as well: not the OS, but the DRM on which all the media is based.
and:
As the OS diminishes in importance going forward in time, the only thing that’s going to separate one system from another is the DRM which is laid on top of it
and:
It’s like 1989 all over again when everyone was begging to license the Mac OS. Two years later Windows 3.0 showed up and Apple is now at 2% market share. If you don’t think the same thing is happening in the media space, you’re dreaming.
Yeah, this is one of those “Oh Christ we’re fucked” moments.