[kingcharles]

I really like these "leaked" emails because a couple of times I've gotten to see behind the curtain of projects, like this one, that I was involved in.

I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through. Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies, they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.

Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music stores.

If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because they did that and owned the whole vertical.

[lozenge]

Oh, that reminds me of Windows Media Player which had like 8 separate music stores embedded in it, seemingly as an iframe. They had the most random companies running them as well, like phone companies, supermarkets, etc. Of course it was just a white label product, so why even include them all?

[kingcharles]

LOL. I coded all of those. It was horrible. Not one of those companies gave a damn about the product, they just wanted a revenue share for putting a link in their stores or on their web sites.

The startup that I was working for was OD2, half-owned by Peter Gabriel, who is a very nice guy. He got us meetings with every label guy we needed to speak to. He gave me his iBook, bless him. OD2 eventually got swallowed by Nokia which of course got swallowed by Microsoft. The snake ate its tail.

[rasz]

From what I know it wasnt Microsoft that broke ground. I remember reading a story about CD distributor whose clients started retracting contracts in 2004. Owner quickly realized Jobs was screwing him over and it took a series of meetings to somewhat fix it.

Was it CD Baby? Definitely not CDNow.

[kingcharles]

Microsoft broke the ground. Their DRM that opened the door for legal music sales came out in 1998 I think. Certainly by 1999 I was using it commercially and had the first labels already onboard.

I remember the controversy - it was CD Baby for sure.

[rasz]

Found it, I remembered everything wrong :) but it was CD Baby being screwed by Jobs "The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote" https://sive.rs/itunes

[neximo64]

You don’t remember Zune then?

[kingcharles]

That was after. That was closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.