Madness
A Microsoft manager beats up on Apple's media format (AAC) for being proprietary and not interoperable. He then proposes using Microsoft's media format (WM9) instead, because it is more popular.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device. Lastly, if you use Apple's music store along with iTunes, you don't have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I'm paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.
Interoperability isn't a popularity contest. It's about the answer to this question: What does a prospective implementer have to do in order to make the implementation work? "Read the public specification" is the right answer. Answers involving signing contracts and paying money are the wrong answer. Microsoft and Apple both have media formats with the fatal defect of an attempt to require contractual privity with implementers. (In the free world, that attempt will fail, but that's little comfort to us in the United States.) Here Fester is suggesting that Microsoft's media format is obviously preferable because more implementers have signed Microsoft's license than Apple's.
His argument is not logic. It is Vae victis!
