1. Tracks cost 2x as much as on iTunes and Amazon
2. Tracks are DRM’d
3. Tracks will only play on the mobile device you bought the track on

Essentially, you are being asked to pay 2x as much for the ability to play a track on a single device — one that you will likely be replacing in less than 2 years.  And I’m sure that if your phone breaks and you get a warrantied replacement, you’ll have to buy the track again.  When asked about this puzzling plan:

What is your message to consumers – why should I come to you instead of Amazon or iTunes? What do you offer that none of your competitors do?

There’s a whole bunch of people who are very loyal to MSN on the web and there’s now almost a million users of MSN Mobile every month, within the space of 12 months of it being launched.

So there’s a whole bunch of people who are using MSN on their mobile phone for a whole variety of reasons. And we’re saying to them, if you want to download music, it’s available here. If you don’t, that’s fine.

It’s a consumer’s choice and they will decide if they’re happy with the MSN Music service or if they want to go somewhere else.

So what they are offering is to milk the fools who use MSN for as much cash as they can get.  Nice…

Today Microsoft announced that they’ll be firing laying-off 1,400 employees today.  While the prevailing economic climate has a lot to do with the layoffs, launching products that don’t provide a competitive advantage but rely on customers being locked into your brand can not have helped.

Seen on Slashdot.

P.S. I still HATE Exchange.

Email:

– GMail is my primary email tool, because of: remote accessibility, no fat client, tags, easy filtering, UI, and much more.
– Google Notifier: a Mac tool that lets me know the number of unread messages in my inbox and give me a message (similar to growl) when I have a new message, this means that I don’t have to check my email and can instantly determine if a new message needs to be addressed immediately or ignored.
– EDM (the UW Email Delivery Manager) for vacation messages (best vacation tool there is) and directing mail to deskmail and GMail
– Deskmail (UW Unix/IMAP for staff) & Webpine (horrible webUI) backup location for my email if I can’t access GMail.
– Imperium IMAP & SquirrelMail — tertiary backup, useful reference when at home and no internet connectivity.

Calendar:

– OracleCalendar: The calendaring server we have been using for years.
– Google Calendar: My personal calendars and subscribed to the OracleCalendar ICS feed of my work calendar. This has worked reasonably well (though Google fails to incorporate some events from my calendar).
– Google Notifier: Tells me when calendar items come up.
– iCal: subscribed to all my (and one of Alyssa’s) calendars, partially for sync to my iPhone and also for additional notification.

Largely because of the biases of the Exchange support team, I had feared that I would have to use one of the ugly, fat Exchange clients (Outlook, Entourage) at least some of the time. But fortunately because of the ingenuity of others that are trying to work around Exchange, I will be able to leave my interactions largely unaffected — and be able to add some functionality. Changes:

Email:

– Exchange: I created a rule to redirect mail to GMail (except invites/updates because that would cause an issue). Additionally, I have another rule to move the mail out of my inbox to my “realbox”, unless it was sent to a specific address (see iPhone).
– EDM: I created a rule to forward mail to a specific address to Exchange (see iPhone).
– iPhone: I configured my iPhone’s “Mail” app to connect to Exchange so any email in my inbox (only messages to a specific address) is pushed to my phone and I get notified. I’ll use this as minimal pager functionality.

Calendar:

– Exchange: this will be the canonical source for my work calendar (instead of OracleCalendar), but I’ll be able to ignore it to a large degree.
– Export Exchange Calendar to ICS: One of the groups that I work with and was migrated to Exchange before me, has come up with a server tool to provide an ICS export of our calendars. This means that Google Calendar and iCal will have full access to subscribe to my calendar with out me having to resort to running Outlook in a VM and regularly exporting my calendar to a WebDav file store.
– iPhone: I locked the iPhone “Calendar” app to Exchange, so I can create/edit/accept/etc meetings from my phone. The only thing I don’t think I can do is create a meeting and invite others (which I do a couple times a year so not a big deal).

So, E-Day was a big waste of time — but shouldn’t impact my ability to work. I’m still not looking forward to the next email I send to “outages” when I’ll get 20+ “Out of office” emails that I won’t give a damn about.