Winner Takes All? No, Winner Plays All

Having run both Napster and iTunes for Windows I found the same thing a USA Today reviewer did

More seriously for users of other software, Apple's songs are sold in the AAC format, which I incorrectly said on my Chat last week was an Apple-proprietary format. It's not, but on the other hand it might as well be: I've had a really hard time finding another Windows jukebox application that works with it. Winamp, MusicMatch, RealOne and Windows Media Player won't play them, and if you want to use Roxio's popular Easy CD and DVD Creator to burn AAC songs to a CD, you're also out of luck.

If you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you have to play them in iTunes for Windows and use that program to transfer to CDs, whether you like it or not. And if you can get it to "rip" songs from your CDs onto your hard drive (which I did successfully on my laptop, but not desktop, which isn't currently recognizing CDs), the songs are automatically encoded in AAC, although a tab does let you switch your save preference to MP3.

The application nicely adds your hard drives MP3's to the library, as does Napster and MusicMatch, but if you happen to have any Windows Media Audio (WMA) files, they don't exist in iTunes.

However you feel about Microsoft and it's dominance of the computer world, the fact is that MusicMatch, Buymusic.com and Napster all sell songs in the WMA format, and more stores are coming. If you mix and match songs from the services, you'll have to make separate CDs, and listen in separate programs. Apple took the radical step of creating a Windows program. Why not go all the way and make life easier for the PC users?

Apple and Microsoft are playing this like the old VHS vs. Beta battle. This is the wrong paradigm. Rather, it is the recordable DVD battle. Here the DVD recorders that won play everybody's format. Whichever jukebox plays all formats wins and with it draws buyers to their storefront. Same thing goes for portable players. The other players in the portable game could care less what the format is. If Apple views Microsoft as the competition they will fail to have iPods play WMA files. Then iPods lose. The game is not winner takes all but winner plays all.