The Microsoft-AOL stitch-up

MSNBC reports:

“May 29 :  In a sweeping settlement, Microsoft will pay AOL Time Warner $750 million to end a private antitrust lawsuit over Web browser technology. The agreement also will place Microsoft digital media technology on AOL’s online service and clears the path for the two companies to explore technology sharing.”

Well, well… Now let’s see what that means, exactly. Scott Rosenberg knows:

“Microsoft pays AOL $750 million, AOL switches to Internet Explorer, and the two biggest behemoths in the online world start working together instead of competing. The next time you hear anyone in the Bush administration talk about the importance of competition and the free market, remember whose Justice Department it was that brought us the Microsoft antitrust settlement.”

Fascinating glimpse: Steve jobs talking off the record about dealing with the music industry

Excerpt from a conversation brilliantly Blogged by Denise Howell. Note: ‘M’ is Walter Mossberg. ‘J’ is Steve:

“M: Were you looking ahead toward working with the labels?

J: That crossed our minds. (Audience laughs.) We understand about intellectual property issues. We make software.

M: Why did the labels do a better deal with you for the Music Store?

J: The content industry and the technology industry never have understood each other. They’re like ships passing in the night. One of the greatest achievements of Pixar was bridging this divide. One of the most important things record companies do is pick which of 500 people will be the next Sheryl Crow. If they don’t do that well, the rest of it doesn’t matter. It’s not surprising that they didn’t understand Napster, or that distributing content over the ‘Net was going to be big. We approached them initially and they said go away. About nine months ago, we began talking to them about this middle path. One of the things that appealed to them about Apple was its smaller percentage of the market, its control over hardware and software, its ability to be sued.

M: (Suggests that Jobs demonstrate the Music Store.)

J: How many people have never seen the iTunes Music Store, show of hands? (About 1/2 the room. Jobs gets up and demos the Music Store.) It’s important and unique to make it easy for a user to find and organize her music library. (Funny moment when software wouldn’t recognize Jobs’ password. Demonstrates one-click song purchase.)

M: If your seven year old gets on this and starts downloading, you’re hosed.

J: Well, you’ve got a lot of great music.

M: What happens if you upload it to Kazaa?

J: Songs will only play on three Macs, so it won’t be very interesting.

J: (Shows how fun it is to look up all the alternate versions of an old classic like “One for the Road:” Willie Nelson, Billie Holiday, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra. You always hear about how mesmerizing Jobs is as a speaker and presenter. It’s especially apparent as he cycles through these versions of “One For The Road.” His joy in the coolness of the software is palpable and infectious. Demos the “browse by genre” feature. Pulls up Barry Manilow’s “Copa Cabana” at Walt Mossberg’s request, because he says it’s Kara Swisher’s favorite.)

M: By the end of the year, everyone’s going to have something like this. Microsoft, Real. What happens when everyone has it?

J: Maybe these guys are a lot smarter than us, they probably are. But it’s really hard to get the rights you need from the labels, it’s really hard to write the software, and you need a usable jukebox. We’ll find out, but I think it might be a little harder than it seems.”

Robert Baer on the US’s addiction to Saudi crude

“The United States’ policies on Saudi Arabia, Baer argues, are built upon the delusion that Saudi Arabia is stable?that both the country and the flow of its most precious commodity can continue on indefinitely. Sustaining that delusion is the immense amount of money (estimated at $19.3 billion in 2000) exchanged between the two partners: the U.S. buys oil and sells weapons, Saudi Arabia buys weapons and sells oil. Oil and the defense contracts underpinning its protection bind these two countries together in such a way that when Saudi Arabia falls — a fate Baer feels is absolutely certain — the U.S. falls too. Perhaps not all the way down, but, if we don’t curtail our dependence, he argues, a failure in Saudi Arabia could have catastrophic consequences for the United States.” [More.]

Official German interest in Linux continues

As I noted, on Wednesday last the City of Munich decided to switch its 14,000 computers from Windows to Linux. Now comes news that the flight from Windows is not just in Bavaria. “In the northern state of Lower Saxony, 11,000 police computers will be switched from Microsoft Windows to Linux from next year, according to the interior ministry. “

The Guardian’s OnlineBlog adds, ” It wasn’t the cheapest option, because Microsoft was willing to deal on price. It was a “strategic decision [that] makes Munich less dependent on one IT supplier and sets a trend toward more competition,” according to Munich’s mayor. Christian Ude.”

The downloading habit continues to spread

“Sharman Networks, the company behind the KaZaA file-swapping service, said its software has been downloaded a staggering 230.3 million times. In an announcement this week, the company said that the KaZaA Media Desktop has become the most downloaded software, with 230,309,616 downloads worldwide. This means that the company’s freeware has overtaken the previous record-holder, ICQ, the predecessor to AOL’s Instant Messenger, as well as other all-time favourites like WinZip.” [More.]

Penguins overrun Bavaria.

… to quote the email link to The Register story. “Linux zealots all over Munich have strapped on their lederhosen and knocked back a few liters of beer after the open source operating system beat out Microsoft’s Windows for a major city contract. Munich will dump 14,000 PCs running Windows and install Linux instead in what is one of the biggest moves away from Redmond to date. The importance of the deal prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to make a last minute pitch and reportedly to undercut an offer from IBM and SuSE. Ballmer’s efforts failed. ”

NYT: Apple Finds the Future for Online Music Sales

story by Neil Strauss. Some quotes:

“Apple Computer seems to have the future of online music in its hands for the moment. Its new service, iTunes Music Store, has been the first real success story in the long effort to sell music over the Internet. In just its first month of operation the service, by the company’s estimate, has sold three million songs online, at 99 cents each. This is an impressive figure considering the limited access that music fans now have to the service. Less than 1 percent of the country’s home computers are Macintoshes that are compatible with the iTunes Music Store, and only a fraction of those have a broadband connection to the Internet.”

But there’s a fly in the ointment…

“That complication came this week when the specter of the music industry, which has been publicly supportive of iTunes, began to loom over Apple. The success of iTunes, after all, depends on cooperation from the music business, which controls the songs that iTunes wants in its collection. Apparently trying to stay in the record industry’s good graces, iTunes removed a service it had previously offered customers. Called Rendezvous, the service enabled listeners and their friends to access one another’s music and listen to it — but not download it — from any computers. Hackers, however, had figured out how to download the music as well, creating programs with names like iLeach and iSlurp. So on Tuesday Apple sent out an update for its iTunes software, disabling Rendezvous and limiting music access to a user’s local network at home or at work.

In a statement released yesterday, Apple said Rendezvous had been “used by some in ways that have surprised and disappointed us.”

“We designed it to allow friends and family to easily stream (not copy) their music between computers at home or in a small group setting, and it does this well,” the statement said. “But some people are taking advantage of it to stream music over the Internet to people they do not even know. This was never the intent.” A spokesman for Apple, Chris Bell, said the company made the decision by itself.

The restriction makes sense: hackers are exploiting a loophole, so get rid of the loophole. But in offering music online, there will always be a loophole. Nate Mook, who runs the online news site Betanews, said hackers were already finding a way around this new restriction, writing software that would trick iTunes into thinking that an outside user’s computer was on a customer’s local network. If Apple responds by limiting the functionality of the music it is selling every time that hackers find a way to trade files, it could end up with a system as unsuccessful as the record industry’s own attempts, like Pressplay and Musicnet.”

At last — a major US politician who understands the significance of end-to-end

Thanks to Larry Lessig for this:

In a paper on Innovation released by the Lieberman campaign today, Senator Joe Lieberman writes, ‘Ensure that the Internet continues to provide an open platform for innovation: The Internet is different from the phone network and radio and broadcast television in important ways. It is easier for individuals and small organizations to be producers as well as consumers of information. The Internet allows for ‘many to many’ communication as opposed to the ‘one to many’ communication of broadcast television. Innovation can occur at the edge of the network. A student, an independent software developer, or a small high-tech company can come up with an idea for a new application, protocol, or kind of content. If enough people find it useful or worthwhile, this idea can spread like wildfire. Even as the Internet evolves, it important to ensure that it continues to provide an open platform for rapid and decentralized innovation, and for the exchange of ideas.’

End to End has gone presidential.

Yippee!.

Great piece by Frank Rich on how US media conglomerates ensure that the US public lives in ignorance of everything except what they define as the agenda

Quote:

“But the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as “The Matrix Reloaded,” but with more damaging side effects.

This is what has happened consistently during America’s struggle with Osama bin Laden. During the years when Al Qaeda’s terrorists were gearing up for 9/11, the media giants were in overdrive selling escapist fare like the Clinton scandals, Gary Condit’s sex life and shark attacks. They were all legitimate stories. But just as “The Matrix Reloaded,” playing on a record 8,517 screens, crowded most other movies out of the marketplace last weekend, so those entertaining melodramas drove any reports of threatening developments beyond our shores to the periphery of the mass-media news culture.

The media giants took the same tack in banding together to push the administration-dictated narrative of Saddam Hussein ? and with the same results. The networks’ various productions of “Countdown: Iraq,” though as ponderous as “The Matrix Reloaded,” were so effective that by the time we went to war, 51 percent of the country, according to a Knight-Ridder poll, believed that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. It took the bloody re-emergence of Qaeda terrorists in Riyadh two weeks ago to recover the repressed memory that none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis and that most of them were Saudis. And whatever happened to Saddam’s arsenal, all those advanced nuclear weapons programs and biological poisons that George W. Bush kept citing as the justification for going to war? Well, sarin today, gone tomorrow. That laundry list of terrors, none of them yet found, vanished from the national consciousness as soon as the cable outlets of AOL Time Warner, Fox and NBC put their muscle behind The Laci Peterson Murder.”[More]

Is the music industry finally getting the Apple Music Store message?

Could it be that the music industry has finally got the message about online distribution? See this report that Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group are to sell their brain-dead online service, Pressplay, to Roxio. “The marketplace has changed,” Sony Music executive VP Robert Bowlin says. “We are in the content business. We don’t have to own the highway necessarily unless it is strategic to do so.”

Well, well… And isn’t it ironic that Roxio owns the Napster brand name?