roger9's Profile

Absolutely. Its not stealing. Folks need to understand that MS and Universal were not looking at the business deal as just the player. It was the whole ball of wax. The player, song purchases, and music subscription. No doubt in order to get something they wanted MS ponied up the $$ per unit sold. Probably as someone mentioned above in relation to the subscription service. Where Universal was given the choice of a certain size of the subscription pie or gambling on making more by taking a bit from the money from Zune unit sales. Regardless the "piece of the unit sale action" is VERY common in the electronics industry.

Actually Apple has already been taken to court on whether they were a monopoly, in Europe, by France. Apple won. The courts ruled that their were plenty of alternatives in the market and as such Apple was not doing anything wrong. Yes they have tied their iTunes music store offerings to the iPod via Fairplay. Not entirely because they are evil, but they negotiated with the content providers who required some form of DRM. Fairplay apparantly satisfied the content providers requirements. Just because Apple's competitors cannot get their heads together to develop a product that can compete isn't Apple's fault. Where do I come up with this moronic bullshit? I've worked with Microsoft, Yahoo, Napster to discuss their plans while working at a competitor of Apple's. Never did anyone whine about Apple being unfair because they wouldn't license Fairplay. They and the company I worked for couldn't get on the same page on how to compete and none of them were willing to invest the time to work on the whole package, SW, HW, storefront to make it a good experience for the end user. Apple didn't make us bumbling idiots....we did that ourselves.