Microsoft pulls music service from wireless carriers Nearly two years after spending $46m to acquire the Musiwave mobile tunes service, Microsoft has informed wireless carriers they can no longer use the service once their contracts expire, according to a source familiar with the matter. This source, who requested anonymity because he feared reprisals from his employer, says …
Screw them!
Apple serves everyone using Apple software, even those with the oldest ipods.
Microsoft was serving WM customers. Now they've given them the shove. Now they're only going to serve Zuned WM7 devices.
Remind us... Why would any hardware vendors want to offer WM products if Microsoft is just going to treat them like this?
Any news on whether the poor bastards who paid for music using this service will be able to continue listening to the songs they purchased after the cutoff? Or will DRM strike again and yet again penalize the folks who thought they were obeying the law when they purchased music?
"Apple serves everyone using Apple software, even those with the oldest ipods."
Not an MS defender, but Apple differs from MS in what exact way then? The last I heard about a certain Palm Pre was that iTunes gets specific updates to keep it away from the system. If Apple is smart it takes a stiff licensing fee from Palm and lets them in, which will pretty much zap MS and make iTunes the default platform - until Microsoft does another DR DOS and the program becomes "unstable" on Windows.
I like the message to mobile carriers: "we're cutting you off because we want to promote an MP3 player. Oh, and we want you to approve our phones so we can make all that money ourselves". That'll go down well with OEM players: "we've nuked the market for you, now play nice and we may give you some scraps".
Feet, meet shotgun.
"This would mirror the way Apple uses iTunes only with the iPhone, iPod, and iPod touch."
If you mean that the Zune will suddenly resemble something other than a dodo, you're completely wrong. I've only met one person who had a zune and when I said "I've never seen one of those before" he said "Well, I'm selling it on eBay and if I get a buyer I'm buying an iPod mini".
Shutting out users of other players isn't doing MS any favours when their own player is a pile of poo.
In contrast, Apple have a VERY high profile player that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon AND you can download tracks on Winblows systems...
So when you said "mirror the way Apple...", you actually meant "be an inferior and completely different solution to the way Apple..."
I feel like one of those naturalists looking for the last dodo :(
I knew someone who claimed to own one- he just never had it with him.. Which maybe indicates that it's a little less "throw in your pocket"-friendly than my tatty old ipod touch (first gen, still going strong).
Shame, as I was curious, would have liked to have seen what the MS take on the portable media player was- as they are the N-hundred pound gorilla in the room.
Didn't Microsoft pull the rug out from under their business partners with that one as well? Same as it ever was.
BTW, there is a leak about the coming zune phone: http://uneasysilence.com/media/2007/01/cellphone_original.jpg
And I saw a zune in the wild last week! It was at a fortune 500 company where I consult, and all I can say is that the person using it is EXACTLY the kind of person who would carry one. And yes, it was brown.
Mine's the one with The Elms' new CD in it.
Apple is already fighting over this type of technically baseless monpolistic tie in with Palm and iTUnes. Microsoft has to go the same route so Apple and Microsoft can point to each other as examples of how this must actually be O.K. and legitimate because the other is doing the same thing.
Microsoft seem to have their fingers in too many pies and just can't give people a simple life. Why have WinMo and another incompatible Zune OS? why buy a service, then disconnect many users of it?
Apple are control freaks but they give people the simplicity they desire.
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