Plays For Sure
It’s 2004, and Apple has been selling iPods for three years, initially for Mac users but later for Windows PC owners too. It has iTunes to sell songs. Consumers are keen. In response, Microsoft launches Plays For Sure, an attempt to regain some level of control of the digital music player market by encouraging iPod and iTunes competitors to come together and back its Windows Media Player formats. The pitch to punters: buy from any compatible store you want, and play your music on any compatible device you want. Lots of hardware vendors signed up; so did music suppliers. But success did not follow. Content companies were keener on selling subscriptions than the single tracks punters wanted, and most players didn’t have marketing might behind them that Apple had granted the iPod. Fail For Sure.
Compatibility never killed the iPod
Microsoft tried again in 2006 with the more iPod/iTunes-like Zune. It still couldn’t get it right, and knocked Zune on the head in June 2012.
Push Technology
Long before Canada’s Research in Motion popularised the term ‘push’ for delivered email, a number of firms, most notably PointCast, used the word to describe new information services that actively sent out updates to users rather simply wait for the users to fire up a web browser and come and get them. PointCast hoped consumers and businesses would be excited by having useful information delivered to their digital door, logging in to their desktops to find news and such waiting for them. There was enough of a buzz around the notion for even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to consider buying PointCast.
But the gap PointCast and others hoped to fill was quickly covered by the then emerging portal websites like Excite and Yahoo! who found that users were happy enough to visit such sites regularly anyway, a process made easy by browser bookmarks. By the end of the 1990s, PointCast and many of its rivals were gone, though the notion of getting information updates, albeit through by pulling them over, was carried on by the developers of the RSS feed.
Next page: Second Life
COMMENTS
Re: VCD's
So ... the VCD's a complete turkey except in Turkey?
Re: Secondlife Is still Alive.
The main fail of SL is it is shit (as pointed out further up thread). The only people that are still there are complete saddos who are trying to convince themselves that it will become relevant again.
Re: Secondlife Is still Alive.
Why so judgemental, Andrew Moore? People do all sorts of things and have all sorts of hobbies that they personally enjoy. They participate because it gives them enjoyment, not from some attempt to be "relevant".
For example, I simply can't get my head round football fans. I don't call them saddos though - why should it bother me what they do?
Likewise, many people still refer to people who have any interest in technology as "saddos" and "nerds". Which makes your comments all the more ironic.
Live and let live, and vive la difference, I say .
Ah memories...
My boss in 2005: "Should we get on this Second Life thing? I keep getting asked why we're not on it by Analysts".
Me: "No, its fucking rubbish". You never get credit for the dodged bullets do you? On the other hand I owned a Newton :(
Re: Hmmmmm
I can answer two of your points... Betamax wasn't 'far better' than VHS - it was a little better, but the tapes were too short to record anything like a movie without switching to slower speeds and negating the benefits. The later extended versions of Betamax were lower quality, while VHS kept improving. If you're talking about Beta, which was used by TV stations, that's a different animal - much higher quality (and much larger tapes)
And the reason 8 track failed was because of its short usable life... I'm old enough to remember trees on the side of the road draped in long gossamer strands of Dark Side of the Moon after someone's 8 track ate yet another tape. While 8 tracks were more convenient, cassettes were a lot more reliable.
