iTunes Bad, WMA good

[bkbroil]

ExtremeTech has published a great article that deals with all the electronic music formats that are out there. The author talks about the why Apple's AAC format is inferior to WMA format and the very end of the article he goes into why Apple is about to be Netscaped! Interesting, I tend to agree with the author. Apple may be on top now, but Microsoft has so much money...that eventually...they'll be Netscaped. What do you think?
Why Apple is Rotten
If I buy music through the iTunes store, it will only play on iTunes or an iPod. That's it, until the end of time. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it for me. How do I know what music player I'm going to want to buy in four years? How do I know my next car won't have a built-in digital music player? I certainly don't expect Apple to make a CarPod. All those iTunes songs I pay for today are going to be useless tomorrow. I generally don't want to play back my music through iTunes -- I want to use a smaller, faster, less obtrusive playback client like Winamp. With music purchased through iTunes, that's not an option.
More Trouble than it's worth
I could still love the iPod if it would only play Windows Media Audio files, so I could buy music from any of the several other online music stores (all but Real's and Sony's use WMA). It doesn't, and Apple shows no sign of bending on that principle, so I'm stuck with MP3 format if I want to play cross-compatible music on an iPod. None of those shiny new music stores are selling MP3s, and they're not about to start.
Apple is About to Get Netscaped
Remember, back in the early days of the Web, when 95% of the world used Netscape? Then, just as the Internet was getting big, Microsoft came out with a faster, more feature-rich browser and gave it away for free (not that anyone actually paid to download Netscape).
Eventually, someone will come out with a player that looks as good and is as much a joy to interact with as the iPod, and I fully expect Microsoft to whip its media playback software into shape with a better interface and a full built-in online music store. IPod sales and iTunes usage will continue to grow but the market will grow even faster, causing their actual market share to shrink. When that happens, and Apple's products become entirely marginalized, I don't want to be stuck with a whole bunch of 99-cent songs encoded with AAC and locked with FairPlay DRM.