Yeah, OK, good luck with that.

First things first, Microsoft is no good at inventing anything. To this day they still don’t have the handheld right.

Windows Mobile is only now starting to be decent and that’s only taken them 15+ years to get close, and it’s only close. It’s good but it’s not great.

They have started bailed, restarted and tweaked Win Pad, Windows CE and now Windows Mobile and still don’t get the fact that handhelds are not just mini desktops.

In the same vain they’ll screw up an mp3 music player.

I refer back to one of my favorite quotes: “Great firms don’t try to be good at everything; they choose where to dominate the competition.” – R.C.

Microsoft has enough fish to fry. They can’t keep tabs on Apple, Google, Yahoo, Sony, Nintendo, and win at everything. It simply can’t be done. They will fail at something. They need to realize that, own up to it and move on.

There’s nothing wrong with entering the market and simply screwing it up for someone else though which they can certainly do.

At this stage of the game however Apple has Microsoft beat in the infrastructure and the device. Don’t get me wrong iTunes isn’t a gem, it’s slow, and bloated. The iTunes store is getting dated, and could use some serious improvements. But Microsoft itself is the pinnacle of “The best doesn’t always win”, marketing and market share does. In this case Steve and Apple have out Microsofted, Microsoft.

A Microsoft driven music device would not thrill me. I’d fear I’d have to use a start menu to launch the player, or put it to sleep. Or worse yet, dig out a stylus to set the equalizer. Nope I don’t see it. By the time it gets to market the Apple gang will be significantly ahead and there will be other players who are good at innovating that might have a chance.

No Microsoft, go play in a different sandbox. Pick something else.

Technorati Tags: iPod, Microsoft, Duh, Apple

Situation: Parents with iPod, upgrade iTunes, it no longer works, on a PC.

Exhibit A:

This page (The 5 Rs of iPod Issues)…

The Problem:

A minor upgrade to iTunes renders it useless. It runs or appears to runs (it shows up in the task manager but displays no UI (user interface). It hangs. The computer also takes forever to reboot or shut down. Said parents have uninstalled, reinstalled both iTunes and Quicktime to no avail. (per the 5 Rs)

• Reset
• Retry
• Restart
• Reinstall
• Restore

Be careful Apple, be very careful. I’m 99% sure Microsoft patented those 5 Rs in the late 80′s and you maybe setting yourself up for some significant back end royalties.

After futzing with this for about an hour and also trying the 5 Rs, I did a little digging on Apple’s site. What a crappy search engine they have for support.

Through one article after another. I finally stumbled across an that did specifically address iTunes not running after an upgrade. Imagine that. Though I was never, ever able to locate it using a search. Not a natural search with terms like.

“iTunes won’t run” or “iTunes won’t run after upgrade” or “iTunes won’t launch after upgrade” or “iTunes Windows upgrade won’t run”

Still even today this article doesn’t appear using these search terms.

The Article: iTunes for Windows doesn’t open after upgrading # 302386 you’d think should certainly jump to the top of the list.

point you towards deleting a file that perhaps is no longer needed or needs to be recreated. We double checked and in fact my father had already taken these steps. It (SC Info.sidb) wasn’t there. After further digging though the directory and even the directory above it was flagged ‘Read Only’. After clearing those attributes. iTunes was once again happy.

But this is Apple, this is Apple software, and it shouldn’t be this hard. I don’t care that it’s running on a PC or not. Least of all the fact that an upgrade, especially for a 5th generation iPod screwed the pooch here.