Lazycoder

Ed hits a nerve

Maybe “Insulting” Was The Wrong Word…

Wow, did Ed hit a nerve on Scoble or what? Three rapid replies in response to Ed’s post.

For the record, whatever record there is for the opinions of bloggers that have a very, very small readership like myself, I don’t get the whole “Scoble insulted the WM team” groupthink that is permeating the blogosphere at this blogosecond .

I thought that some of Scobles suggestions (Ludacris designing hardware? “It’s gotta be crushing yo! Wif’ DIAMONDS! Whuuuut?”) were dumb. But I didn’t think he was insulting the WM group. Maybe they are actively involved in marketing the OEM hardware though. My first thought was, “If Microsoft isn’t going to go into the hardware music player business maybe it should try to get Apple to license WMA and let the iPod play WMA files?”.

That’ll never happen, folks inside of Microsoft like Scoble can’t accept defeat even if it’s on a playing field that Microsoft isn’t working in (e.g. portable music players). Does Microsoft really think that people care about AAC and WMA? It’s about the iPod and the music. Since Microsoft is in the software business, XBox not withstanding, they shouldn’t concentrate on making a new piece of hardware as cool as the iPod, they should concentrate on making the iPod play their software. Follow Real’s route and provide a manner for putting WMA files on the iPod. If you market the music (Napster, Wal-Mart, MSN Music store) the people will seek out the player to play the music on.

All of Microsoft’s product launches and marketing seems really re-active as of late. They are always second to market in any field and usually a considerable amount of time after the market leader. That makes them look like big, dumb copycats (to regress back to 3rd grade a bit). A $50 billion dollar Johnny-come-lately.