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An article on the Independent News website has an article on which format will win out. Will WMA, AAC or MP3 win out, what do you think? An emerging version of this conflict is being fought out now over standards for music purchased online. It boils down to this: will Apple support Microsoft's "Windows Media Audio" (WMA) format for purchased music on the iPod music player? Or has the Apple-preferred (but not Apple-owned) "Advanced Audio Codec" (AAC) format that it uses through its own iTunes Music Store become a de facto standard that others - including Microsoft - will have to adjust to?
Now, plenty of people out there think Apple will have to, and is going to, support WMA. Among them is the journalist Paul Thurrott, who says that when HP announced last month it would resell iPods, "a contact close to HP told me point blank that HP was requiring Apple to add WMA support to the iPod". HP said shortly afterwards that on its own-label iPods "we're not going to be supporting WMA for now", which is nicely ambiguous.
However, there are plenty of people who think Apple won't offer WMA support. The question is, does it matter? And who will be hurt more if it doesn't - Apple, Microsoft, or the average buyer?
At the moment Apple has about 25 per cent of the digital player market by numbers, and a huge wodge of the value: the iPod is slightly more expensive than comparable players that use a hard disk, which make up the high-price end of the market. Its market share is also sure to jump once HP starts reselling it. Then there are lots and lots and lots of small digital players that use flash memory - rewritable memory chips - to store an hour or so of music; byte for byte, they're more expensive than hard disks, but you can get them for less than £100.
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Let's not forget one important thing. Microsoft has the CLOUT to make things go their way, and $40 BILLION in cash to back that up. Look at what they did with X-Box. It's a mediocre, low powered PC with a decent video card. But they put their muscle behind it, and it worked.
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