While we're poking scoble with a big stick, he's ripped into the Windows Media team. He's both misguided and unfair. For some reason he thinks that the Windows Media team produce portable media players. This is news to me. They produce codecs, SDKs and help OEMs make media players. What they do not do is produce some mythical iPod equivalent. Scoble expects the team to drop their position, piss off the OEMs and produce their own portable player. Setting aside how that will annoy the channel and raise the spectre of more anti-trust investigations he wants the team to consult with the blogsphere over the design of the new player. Now I realise scoble has a long standing love affair with blogs, but this latest post makes me wonder if he's sane. I'm sorry, but the likes of NME and Melody Maker have a better influence over music listeners than blogs do. Blogs are still aimed at a technical elite. The iPod is aimed at music fans and those who want something pretty. The two markets are not the same. As proof of his futher insanity he believes that Elton John could design a decent player. Please, it's not like U2 had any input into their branded iPod aside from "Sure, put our music on it and pay us".

Oh and Robert, whilst I was heavily involved in streaming media we were already crying for the codecs to get open sourced, you're way behind the curve on this. If you had looked through the email discussion lists (yes Robert, there are non-blog methods of communication) a few of us had been clammering for this.

There are some decent people in the WM team who helped out and answered stupid questions whenever I had them; Robert you need to apologise to the WM team, you're insulting them because they don't do what you want. They're not a hardware team. Music players are not yours to make, you have sold windows media as being better than apple's offering because there are so many choices now you want to make your own which, lets face it, would end up being the favoured player and removing the choice.

Looks like Ed Kaim feels the same way as I do.