Charles on… anything that comes along

New Microsoft Portable Media Center, Why Not Just Use a Laptop? is a very good piece of analysis which points out the obvious about these would-be video-playing handheld devices: actually, most people don’t have a hole the shape of a video-playing handheld device in their lives.

The example of 3 (the 3G phone company), which thought that offering video calls would win it a million customers in the UK, shows this. It ended 2003 far short of its target. Now that it’s instead focussed on cheap phone calls for the pay-as-you-go market, it’s adding subscribers faster than anyone else.

I commend the whole article, but here’s the killer point:

But seriously, do any of us really need to be watching TV and movies everywhere? Who even cares or wants to? If I’m at home and just want to relax or have background noise, then sure I’ll turn on the TV or watch a movie. If I’m out or traveling I like to read, do work, or maybe even be engaged with other people and looking at the world around me. I don’t care to do more work and carry more devices so I can fit more TV into my life. In fact, people work more and more busy now than ever due to higher worker hours and what not, so I really hope that the good people of the world spend more quality time being engaged with family and friends and not an 80GB handheld TV player that gives no opportunity of interacting with others or doing productive work.

I’d give them a shelf life of 6 months. 18 months tops.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• That wheezing noise? It's Portable Media Centers (or Centres) (24 July 2004; score: 70.35%)
• Media Center PCs: is the demand there? (4 January 2005; score: 66.9%)
• Fiorina's curse lives on after HP kills Apple deal to resell iPod (1 August 2005; score: 57.69%)

Yes, very impressive - now I’ll have to root around and find out from Big Champagne how the file-sharing networks are doing.

Remarkably, at the time of writing, Apple doesn’t have a press release about the fact of passing 100 million songs sold online. You’d think they’d have had it prepared and linked with a little script so that when the counter whizzed past 100m the bumph would get emailed out to hacks everywhere. Well that’s how I’d do it.

And of course this immediately obsolesces all those Konfabulator and other widgets that were watching the count. It’ll be interesting to see if that feed showing songs sold continues now.

A problem for sites like Napster and OD2 that offer subscriptions and streaming is that while they’re prefectly good revenue models (I think that actually cheap subscriptions to try songs, and then a fee to buy them outright, is a brilliant model: like radio, but you get to choose right away to get a track), they don’t produce headline figures like “100 million”. What’s more, as long as the iTunes Music Store continues to be successful like this - and it’s hard to say that rivals are succeeding because they can’t provide such headline figures - there’s no incentive for Apple to alter its model.

The same holds with the iPod: it *could* play WMA format. That could be done right now with a firmware update. But until it becomes important to add value to the iPod by making it able to play WMAs, Apple won’t do it. WMA on the iPod is a marketing decision, not a technology decision. And presently Apple has no reason to add subscription to the iTMS, or WMA to the iPod. In its position, would you?

Update 14:08 The email has gone out, though it’s not on the Apple site (so no link): ” The 100 millionth song, Somersault (Dangermouse remix) by Zero7 was purchased by Kevin Britten, age 20, of Hays, Kansas on Sunday, July 11.” The URL will only work if you’ve got the latest iTunes, of course.

Update 16:28 The iTunes Music Store Downloads Top 100 Million Songs press release is up too.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Still waiting for IMAP on Gmail? You might already have it... (15 November 2007; score: 26.4%)
• On file-sharing, lawsuits and the price of downloads (16 March 2005; score: 25.04%)
• Could you explain the question first, Clippy? (1 October 2004; score: 22.44%)