Showing posts with label msn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label msn. Show all posts

21 January 2009

Microsoft's Cunning Plan: DRM Costs More

You've got to give it to Microsoft: they really think outside the box. After all, who else would have come up with the brilliant wheeze of justifying prices that were over the odds for mobile downloads by adding that super-useful, super-popular feature of DRM?


The paid-for MSN Mobile Music service, launched in partnership with London-based VidZone Digital Media, offers tracks for £1.50, ringtones for £3 and videos for £2 from http://www.msn.co.uk

...

The prices seem steep in comparison with other paid download sites around: market leader iTunes, which will soon allow 3G iPhone users to buy songs, commonly offers single tracks for £0.79, while Amazon.co.uk goes as low as £0.59 for recently released singles. And Musically.com points out that unlike those download services, MSN Mobile tracks are not DRM-free. A message on the help section of the site reads: "When you purchase the music, you get unlimited plays for the content whilst it remains on the device. At this stage, you cannot transfer your music to another device or PC."

Sounds like a winner to me.

24 April 2008

Is Cheating in Microsoft's DNA?

Seems so:

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN

23 April 2008

DRM: The Gift that Keeps on Taking

Now, people, aren't you really glad you bought DRM'd music:

Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

...

This doesn't just apply to the five different computers that PlaysForSure allows users to authorize, it also applies to operating systems on the same machine (users need to reauthorize a machine after they upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, for example). Once September rolls around, users are committed to whatever five machines they may have authorized—along with whatever OS they are running.

Good job nobody's upgrading to Vista, anyway.

30 May 2007

Mozilla Trumps MSN

The virtual tracks left by people as they change jobs delineate the shifting patterns of the business world: a concentration towards or away from a company speaks volumes about the subtle and mostly invisible dynamics that lie below. So this news truly speaks volumes:

Li Gong, the former top executive for MSN in China, has joined Mozilla's Chinese subsidiary, Mozilla Online, as its chairman and CEO.

Microsoft, are we worried yet?

04 May 2007

Microsoft +Yahoo! = MegaHard!!!

Very interesting development here: Microsoft is starting to pursue Yahoo. This is completely logical: Microsoft is getting so utterly trounced by Google that it needs to bulk up fast in the online search sector and its related fields.

Of course, integrating two such companies would be a hugely challenging task, and might be disastrous for both. But assuming it happens and doesn't collapse under its own weight, such a merger would also have very interesting repercussions for open source.

After all, Google is pretty wedded to free software as a competitive weapon against Microsoft, whereas Yahoo is probably more neutral on the matter. If Microsoft got its mitts on Yahoo, that would undoubtedly change, and its offerings would become far more Windows-centric - at which point, things would start to get really nasty.

It's certainly a cool scoop for the New York Post, but I do wonder about their subs (maybe they trained on the Grauniad):

Microsoft and Yahoo! also feature complimentary offerings on the content side, with MSN drawing an older audience with its news focus.

I'm not sure their very complimentary at the moment, but doubtless they will become that way if Microsoft pulls this off.

12 December 2006

5 Things I've Learned From a Year's Blogging

Today is the first anniversary of opendotdotdot. Since this fact is of little interest to anyone but myself, I thought it might be useful to extract what pearls of wisdom I can from the experience of writing 1,260 posts in that time.

1. Google is your friend

Over half the traffic that arrives on these pages comes from Google. Moreover, the absolute number of visitors directed here by the Google machine just keeps on going up. I can only presume that the more posts you make, the more Googlejuice you generate, and the more you move up the ranks. Indeed, when I take a look at some of the keywords people enter in Google before arriving here, it is gratifying to find this blog pretty highly placed, albeit for some pretty wacky terms (like "wackypedia" and "seed gestapo") as well as a few surprisingly mainstream ones (like "philip rosedale interview").

2. Yahoo and MSN are a waste of time


I'm constantly amazed at how utterly Google dominates the search engine field in terms of the visitors it provides. I had expected MSN to be way behind, but not Yahoo; in fact, I get more visitors from MSN than Yahoo, which barely registers at all. Maybe this says something about the kind of readers/searches that end up at my blog, but it also emphasises the importance of Google. Interestingly, Technorati also generates far more leads than either Yahoo or MSN.

3. People like tags

The first version of the blog had no tags, for the simple reason that Blogger did not offer the facility, and I was too lazy to do it by hand. But when the new Blogger beta came out with tags, I dutifully employed them. I'm glad I did, because people really like using them to search within the blog. In fact, like me, people are lazy: they just can't be bothered entering a search term in the blog search box, but they can summon up the energy to click on one of the tags. One consequence of this is that I intend to go back and tag all of the older posts, since it clearly is something people find useful.

4. People like weird stuff

I am resigned to the fact that I am completely unable to judge which posts will be popular or not. Sometimes I spend ages crafting some witty/profound/novel/hot post, only to have it roundly ignored by almost everybody. Equally, I've often knocked out a trivial/pointless/content-free post only to find everyone and their dog rush to admire its insights. Sigh.

5. It gets easier

In many ways, the most important lesson that I take away from a year's blogging is that the more you do, the easier it gets. This is not just because you learn to type faster, but also because I've found that blogging helps me think faster and maybe even better. It's also a direct consequence of the fact that it's such damn good fun.