Platform Wars

It's all on again with the release of Tiger, as Apple continues to trump the Wintel Yokels on the fronts where they matter ... digital entertainment.

Of course the Microsofties have always been jealous about the coolness factor that Apple engenders but this latest spat had it's beginnings with the emergence of the iPod as a genuine drop-dead hit. But when you have the device, the application and the service so nicely integrated and effortless to use, it's no wonder they're shirty.

Microsoft for their part are hampered in this because they only make the software (if you can call a repository for malware by such a harmless name) and the hardware makers in their camp are hampered because they have to rely on the bohemoth to turn out something that will deal to iTunes and quick smart. Chances of that happening are almost at the same odds as Steve Jobs sitting down to a t-bone in Palo Alto with Kevin Rollins.

The latter mentioned, from Dell, the company often compared to Buick, alos make an MP3 player, dubbed the DJ. Rollins is so steamed at Apple that he referred to the iPod as a passing fad, saying that in his day they had the Walkman. Wake up Man, the iPod is the 21st Century Walkman.

The jealousy is palpable. You see it in the way the PC centric media write about anything to do with Apple. They detest the fact that the company and Steve Jobs is now on its third coming thanks to the amazing job done with the music thing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with Rob Glaser from Real Networks. He is a real angry, meat-eating Windows zealot who just can't help himself. So angry in fact that he had his engineers tweak his Harmony software so it would work with iPods. Not sure how many iPod owners had actually signed up to use Harmony before Apple rewrote the code to block it again, but it was a dirty, sly, behind-the-back trick that these guys have to resort to now to get market share in this segment.

I'm also unsure how Tera Patrick managed to pull this off but there is an hilarious transcript of a lunch meeting between Rob Glaser and Steve Jobs in Palo Alto right here.

MSFT Bashing

Meanwhile over at Microsoft, discontent is brewing as they play catch-up on all number of fronts. Because of their stated objective of being everywhere, Microsoft hampers itself every time. The fight for supremacy of the digital domain will move to the home and the handset within the next 10 years and don't they know it. Publicly they bet the farm on Windows and this hampers any efforts at innovation.

It's employees are some of the most active bloggers anywhere. One of them, Scobelizer was moved of course to write an open letter to BG about getting a decent MP3 player built and has been very vocal about Ballmer's decision not to support the gay rights bill in Washington State after they backed down to pressure applied by a fundamentalist church.

There's a lot more hand-wringing going on over there and guys like this spill a lot saying right there in his URL the company would be better off without Ballmer.

The employees represent the heart and soul of a company and I'd say going by the above that MS is sick, and in need of remedial surgery to revive it. They've sat on their hands on their Browser, the OS and their Server products. The Execs still talk the talk though. Look at Jim Allchin, the Windows boss, dismissing Tiger a couple of days prior to release as being nothing more than a "peripharal to the iPod". If only you could refer to Windows in such flattering terms.