Biggest announcement in technology in some time: this week the iTunes Music Store, the nation’s largest retailer of music (bigger than Amazon, bigger than the Great Arkie Satan, bigger than Target or Tower or Virgin Megastore or Charlemagne Records down on the Southside), went to 100% DRM-free music (and at 256 kbps, no less). This is big for two reasons:
1) No longer can one plausibly claim that the iTMS locks you into Apple products – yes, you have to use iTunes to get at the stuff, but that is free software, and once you have the tracks, they will play just fine on any device capable of handling MPEG-4-standard multimedia. If your device cannot handle the MPEG-4 standard, then your device is a piece of shit and you should replace it.
2) No longer can any online music retailer insist on DRM’d music and expect to succeed. Apple no longer has it, and the one entity I think capable of surpassing Apple in the music sales sphere (that would be Amazon) has never had it as far as I know. It’s going to be damn near impossible for somebody to come in with some non-standard format and convince people to take a flyer. Sony tried it, with some variant of their horribly-named ATRAC format (say it three times real fast and watch the 70s well up around you!) and failed horribly. And Microsoft…
Let’s face it, it was risible when the likes of Steve Ballmer would go out there and say that Windows Media Audio was the format that gave you real choice in your digital music. The choice, of course was between the likes of the Zune format of WMA, the “Plays For Sure” variant of WMA (generally known in the industry as “Plays For Shit” and utterly thrown under the bus by Microsoft when the Zune hit), the prior Windows Music incarnations (some going back to before 2000)…well, the use of an unencrypted MPEG-standard format means that you can go out and get hardware from other providers and still use your iTunes content, so this might actually be good for the hardware business if somebody wants to try to tool up to do to Apple what Apple did to…hell, I don’t know, Creative? Rio?
I say that to reinforce what I said last week: if your next big thing runs on a PC, it’s not the next big thing. Personal computers are still out there and fine for the usual applications, but all the hype in high-tech is in the Web 2.0 – social networking – personal entertainment – smartphone sector. Personal computing is ubiquitous, but it’s also become a commodity experience (something Microsoft isn’t really helping by hammering the “PCs are cheap!” angle). People do the stuff they have to do on a PC, irrespective of OS, but increasingly, they do the stuff they want to do on a Wii, or an XBox, or an iPhone, or a Blackberry, or on whatever web browser is handy to get them to Facebook.
The reason you see Microsoft lunging to advertise now – the reason you see them falling about themselves to take shots at a competitor with one-eighth of the market share in personal computers that WIndows-based systems have* – is because it’s starting to become apparent that the world of high-tech in 2009 is not dependent on Microsoft products in any way. Don’t believe me? There’s a manager at my office who does everything he does on a MacBook Air – the machine I once derided as a mid-life crisis computer, a machine unfit for anyone to use as their sole system. If he doesn’t need Microsoft products as a working lead in Tier 1 IT support…how long before no one does? And if nobody depends on Windows, what exactly does Microsoft have left to sell?
Actually, what do they have to sell? The Zune is the butt of jokes from Washington (the Junks: “I wouldn’t have that piece of S if you paid me to use it”) to Hollywood (Craig Ferguson: “Of course you haven’t heard of the Zune…probably because it Zucks.”). Windows Media just got the nuts cut out from under it vis-a-vis digital music. Windows Mobile got its lunch eaten by RIM in the business market and by Apple in the consumer smartphone space. The XBox 360 is still doing well with hardcore gamers, but got lapped in the mainstream mind by the Wii. In short, once you take away the advantages of incumbency and OS tying…well, it’s not 1995 anymore.
And for that, we can all be grateful.
* Especially risible is the notion that instead of an overpriced pretty pretty Apple that’s only useful as a status symbol and a shiny thing, you should buy…a Sony VAIO. Ask anyone who actually does support for a living what they think of Sony’s laptops. Then plug your ears.