2006-12-07 Ramblings
Thursday, December 7, 2006# I like radio, and I listen to TripleJ whenever I can. I choose TripleJ because it has no ads, intelligent discourse, up to date music and a variety of programs. I like radio because it's a no-effort way to browse new music. The next step seemed obvious to me: they showcase a lot of music on their radio station, why not offer it for sale on their website? Thus, I hear a new track by an obscure artist which I like, I go to their website and I order the CD. Simple! But no! they have to complicate things - they only offer digital downloads and only for Windows and IE6... such a simple concept stuffed up by idiocy.
It would seem the first mention of digital music sends companies into a panic frenzy of marketing and DRM and they come up with these half-baked, convoluted products. I just want to buy music - go to a shop find a CD, pay for it and go home and enjoy. What is so hard about that?
Looking around I see that BigPond and Optus both only support Windows Media, despite the fact that I see Apple laptops in their TV ads. I also note that Bigpond uses Microsoft playsforsure .... sure, unless you have a Microsoft Zune on which that music will not play. Ah hah! I just realise why they did that, it's simply so that other music shops don't compete with Zune Marketplace. How do you like them apples Bigpond? Shut out of Microsoft's big entrance into the digital music scene... Bigpond also talk up their dual download feature - boy does that reek of a solution looking for a problem...
Optus don't event let you browse without Internet Explorer. Amusingly Optus offer support for Firefox users who want to browse their music store: go get the IETab Firefox extension .
The world of Digital music today is just dumb, dumb, dumb, so many players all trying to lock you in, stupid restrictions, stupid products. So where can one find sanity? Well try Sanity ! You can browse their whole collection buy a CD and have it delivered.
# Moving on, a continuation of a previous topic, more about IBM products and webstandards :
During a one day workshop on WebSphere that I attended I noticed that the default markup used is far from up-to-date. It didn't seem quite as bad as that produced by most Microsoft products, but I did not like what I saw. If the end result is going to adhere to the Swedish Guidelines for public sector websites, much of the default front-end code has to be heavily modified.
BOOYAH! Take that IBM.
# Sometimes I think the time has passed for the little guy to make it big with a web app. While the big companies were snoozing early this century the time was ripe. But now the big companies have gotten over themselves and can see the success of the few who did it, they have the money and resources to do serious web apps. I Don't think little guys can compete any more. And if they do come up with something , it's trivial for the big guys to make their own version that's bigger and more distributed.
Or maybe that's just short sighted. Big companies certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. After all, 88Miles seems to be going great guns!
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