Rest of industry slowly catching on to Apple's music integration approach

I don't know where you got this information about Microsoft's peripherals being designed and built by HP, but I've certainly heard nothing to that effect. This series of videos http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=75782 touring the Microsoft Hardware Labs certainly indicates that Microsoft is responsible for the design of its own hardware.

Microsft was a hardware company - sort of - when it made an 80 column card for the Apple II (ca 1982) - came with Pascal in firmware or maybe hardware I forget.

#22: I'm not an expert in the Flash system YouTube uses or Real's video codec, but I would image the effects you're describing are probably due to good ol' fashioned video compression being applied to the videos in a hardcore way. After all, YouTube needs to find *some* way of cutting down on its inhuman bandwidth bill.

Now that I think about it from a bandwidth bill perspective: maybe Real's codec actually sucks. After all, their bandwidth bill is probably next to none :).

Yea, because one product Microsoft brought in a troop to bring to fruition suddenly transforms a 20+ year old software company into a hardware company.

Get a grip guys.

Rob is absolutely correct. Not to mention Microsoft's other big name hardware -- Xbox, as mentioned earlier. What a glaringly misinformed post this was.

>[* - Microsoft's mice and keyboards (and possibly other peripherals) don't >count. Last I heard, they're designed and built by HP.]

Utter crap. Every hardware product with Microsoft's name on it is designed by a group inside of Microsoft. Period.

As is standard industry practice, most or all of these devices are manufactured in China by ODMs. Apple and HP (just to use two examples) do the same thing.

One more depressing thing: Youtube content looks like Real content. Right down to the blurriness and motion blocks.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Other than that? Real is repulsive. Please make everything about it smaller, including that Steve Case wannabe in the article.

As soon as a technology company talks about becoming a media business you know there's going to be trouble ... Sony are one of the few companies to have pulled this off.

Real screwed up with their crappy realplayer software, spyware, slow, buggy crud. The technology was good though. They should have stayed clear of trying to be a media network.

lets face it they are between Apple and Microsoft ... not a great place to be. Where are they making their money?

Zune is a clever idea - credit to MS. When will they decide to go into hardware making special pc's? That would be very funny for Dell, etc!

Microsoft really needs to use the xbox platform to it's advantage, it has a similar target audience.

#11 - You've uncovered the true reason for Vista's delay: like the rest of us, Microsoft has bought into the neverending Mac cycle: Should I buy a Mac now? Oh no, let's wait until after WWDC, MWSF, ...

Conversations in Redmond go like this:
Q: Should we release Vista now?
A: Are you kidding? Steve Jobs has a keynote coming up.
Q: Can we fix a new release date?
A: Yeah, we wait until OS X features have been frozen for three or more years. Then we make our move to trump them...