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LaLa Music Service to be Discontinued May 31

Apr 30, 2010 at 4:53am
 
I received an e-mail today from LaLa indicating the service would be discontinued May 31 st.  LaLa was bought by Apple last year and everyone expects some sort of iTunes in the cloud service.  I assume that true, but what I don't like about the notification is that they are just pulling the plug with no replacement in functionality.  Everyone assumes Apple will announce something sometime in June.  It is as if Apple has literally killed a competing music service with only a promise of a comparable replacement.  
LaLa offered a great service that allowed you to buy web songs for only 10 cents.  These songs lived on the cloud and you could stream them through your web browser to listen to them.  You can buy the un-DRMed MP3s too for the typical 99 cents and the also offered the physical CD.  You could buy a web song or MP3 then upgrade to the next level for just the difference in price.  LaLa also sync'ed all of your existing music to their servers so that you could view and stream it anywhere you had a web browser and an Internet connection.  (They just recently discontinued uploading your MP3s if they weren't already in their catalog.  I assumed there digital rights legal reasons behind this change.)
 
Lets hope that Apple's iTunes upgrade is spectacular, otherwise this really will be disappointing.. and evil.. Microsoft-style.
 
 

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"Windows 7 - It's not Vista"

Oct 22, 2009 at 9:33am
 
via microsoft.com

.. and that is the slogan that will draw 20 million customers lemmings off the cliff.

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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why the Borg's copycat business model no longer works

Oct 22, 2009 at 9:27am
 
Larry's like, Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They've always been copiers. That's been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they've done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple's ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s -- that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn't just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free -- the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.

via fakesteve.net

About once every other week, FSJ blogs something insightful. This time around, I rather liked his thoughts on Microsoft's inability to get traction in new markets these days. FSJ, cites cloud computing, search, music, etc. I think the best thing for Microsoft is to have a big fall, then come back a leaner, smarter, and less evil entity - kinda like IBM. (Remember when we hated them?)

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John Duprey

John Duprey

John Duprey is a husband, father, and geek. He makes his living from the latter as a software developer for Thomson Reuters Research and Development. However, he lives for the former two - his wife Abby and their daughter Emma.

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