I said yes­ter­day that I’m a fan of what Microsoft have been doing of late and Slash­dot­ters are idiots. One rea­son for that is IE7, as that post dis­cussed, but in terms of what other things Microsoft have been doing I didn’t really men­tion any­thing. Well, one new Microsoft prod­uct that does immensely sen­si­ble things is Live Mes­sen­ger 8.1 Beta (see, I didn’t call it MSN any­more!) which finally lets you appear offline and con­tinue con­ver­sa­tions with­out hav­ing to close win­dows… it’s a pol­ish release, and feels good.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, though, is Win­dows Media Player 11. It’s got a new inter­face, plenty of usabil­ity tweaks, a bunch of music store enhance­ments (eugh, sorry, I can’t be pos­i­tive about this one) — notably URGE — and prob­a­bly more DRM to go along with it, and an even-better-than-version-10 CD-ripping interface.

It’s designed as a one-click process, but makes selec­tion of for­mat, bitrate, etc. com­pletely quick, easy, and painless.

It’s great.

My only qualm is that it’s impos­si­ble to select any other for­mat than the ones orig­i­nally pre­sented. Sure, this is a Microsoft prod­uct and it’s tar­geted at computer-illiterate types the world over and hav­ing an “add your own command-line encod­ing option” option prob­a­bly isn’t great from a usabil­ity for all per­spec­tive, but what’s wrong with hav­ing the option there? I’m not going to rip my music in a DRM for­mat, ever.¹ It’s just not going to hap­pen. I’ll sooner be stuck lis­ten­ing to CDs and scratch­ing them to death and then buy­ing new ones. You already give me the option to rip an MP3, so why not other for­mats you can’t control?

The only rea­son I can come up with is that other, com­pet­ing, for­mats are tech­ni­cally supe­rior. You feel threat­ened by FLAC (were it to become widely adopted) as it is supe­rior to WM Loss­less… prob­a­bly because it lacks DRM. Jus­ti­fi­ably, you don’t feel so threat­ened by MP3 as it is, in gen­eral, infe­rior in every way (except it lacks DRM) — even though it has mas­sive penetration.

Even that pen­e­tra­tion is slip­ping because peo­ple don’t change defaults and are rip­ping their music using Win­dows Media Player or iTunes. So, you know, there’s less to be lost by let­ting the geeks play with their zany open source for­mats. The pro­les will never actu­ally know or care enough to embrace them, you keep your con­trol, and an under­class (or silent rul­ing class?) ben­e­fits and is endeared towards your brand. And, of course, geeks are vocal about prod­ucts: I love Win­dows Media Player 11, but this lit­tle thing really gets to me. If you give me that, then I will be so happy with it I’ll be con­stantly try­ing to con­vert iTunes users — admit­tedly, I’ll prob­a­bly fail because their col­lec­tions are under pro­pri­etary lock and key and their hard­ware has bound them to it, but in a cou­ple of years when their iPod bat­ter­ies die they’ll see the error of their ways.

Geeks will too read­ily pros­ti­tute them­selves and become prod­uct evan­ge­lists — but, beware, we are noto­ri­ously given to infidelity.

1. I will, how­ever, rip my music in non-rights man­age for­mats and let soft­ware con­vert it as nec­es­sary for play­back on retarded hard­ware devices. I haven’t required hard­ware that has such dra­con­ian require­ments yet, but if I ever do, this will be the clos­est I get to compromising.