confuseme ([info]confuseme) wrote,
@ 2006-08-29 15:50:00
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Entry tags:work

acquisitions
Last December, I learned that FolderShare was acquired by Microsoft. I worked at FolderShare in the early days, and had a hand in building all of the major pieces of the system. After I left they continued to improve it for a couple years, but I figure Microsoft owns some fairly substantial chunks of my code now. Too bad I didn't have any stock.

More recently, I learned that Sony Pictures had agreed to buy Grouper, where I worked until early this year. I put a lot of effort into Grouper, and wrecked my wrists in the process, so I was very happy to hear that it amounted to something. And this time, I did have some stock! As one of my friends put it, I won the Internet Lotto -- but only the scratch-and-win game, not the mega-jackpot game with the little numbered balls.


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[info]dr_pipe
2006-08-30 07:05 pm UTC (link)
biz.yahoo says grouper is the second largest video community, but news.znet says it's the 8th. what gives?

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[info]confuseme
2006-08-30 10:22 pm UTC (link)
Beats me, man. Maybe they count differently.

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[info]dr_pipe
2006-08-30 07:16 pm UTC (link)
now what do you make of this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5294842.stm

Vivendi Universal, the world's biggest music group, has signed a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service...

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[info]confuseme
2006-08-30 10:30 pm UTC (link)
Wow, that's great! I didn't expect anything like that to make it to market for a while yet. I wonder what the numbers will look like on ad-supported music downloads. They're probably not so hot -- I think all-you-can-eat subscription services are where it's at.

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[info]dr_pipe
2006-08-31 12:49 am UTC (link)
all-you-can-eat subscription services where, if you cancel your subscription after 10 years, all the stuff you've downloaded is DRM'd to stop working and you're left with nothing to show for all the money you've put in? I'm not so into that. (of course anything with DRM can probably be hacked, but I'm talking about using the service as intended.)

Now, if there are subscription services that let you download and keep the stuff unconditionally, then yeah, awesome!

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[info]confuseme
2006-08-31 06:11 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure which way that will go. Imagine, though, a subscription service to a well-organized jukebox full of pretty much all records ever. Not really focused on "downloads", you just find the song you want and hit play (or make playlists, load up your iPod, whatever). When your subscription expires, you lose access to all that music. But for some flat monthly fee, you get access to everything. You'd be paying for access to music the same way people pay for access to cable TV.

If that fee came down low enough, I'm not sure I would care whether I kept the music afterward. It would kind of make the whole idea of keeping a record collection seem obsolete. The service probably wouldn't even have to use DRM, because their collection would be so much bigger, better organized, and more compelling than whatever you could hope to store yourself.

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[info]dr_pipe
2006-08-31 08:59 pm UTC (link)
I could see myself using a service like that; in fact one of the best things about Napster was just the ability to use it as a reference tool. Just being able to sample anything you want to is pretty nice.

But I would still have to acquire my favorite music in a more permanent fashion. I wouldn't want to cancel my subscription service after 10 years, or have it go out of business, or switch to some proprietary format that only works on their new player device that I don't want to buy, or whatever, and find myself with none of the music I'd been building up a collection of (or, you know, playlists or favorites indexes of) over all that time.

I don't know; I kind of think a sampling service where you don't actually get to keep anything you hear should be free, supported by advertising like the radio. Then songs you download to keep should be somewhere between 10 and 25 cents. Or have a subscription for 5 or 10 bucks a month which gets you unlimited free samples, 50 or so free permanent downloads, and a 10 to 25 cent charge for permanent downloads beyond those.

I'm not so into the $1 per song model, because that costs the same as a CD for a whole album of 12 or 15 songs. One of the benifits of online distribution should be more money getting straight to the artist, since no physical objects need to be made, and therefore a lower final cost to the consumer. I mean, if things worked the way they should.

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