"A Market on the Corner Ain't a Corner on the Market"
That's an old saying about the difficulty of even well-positioned businesses to dictate terms to customers.
And now on with the news:
Sony will now support mp3.
Like Sony had a choice….
P2p and file sharing are here to stay, locked in solid, and mp3s are the preferred modes of listening. That's it, plain and simple, highly expensive attempts by Sony and others to force people into adopting proprietary technologies notwithstanding.
Whole thing here.
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Finally, someone shakes a little cheese in front of the hamster wheel inside Sony's head. Sony's creepy attachment to ATRAC locked three full generations of their portable music hardware -- MD, file-capable CD portables and flash/hard drive-based players -- out of my toy budget. If there was any positive return for Sony on this technology I'm not aware of it.
I really liked ATRAC. They've just never let it be computer friendly, so The Market has spoken. Now if only we can get them to send the "Memory Stick" to oblivion as well.