The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that Microsoft has "betrayed" MSN Music customers and wants the company to make things right by issuing an apology, refunds, and eliminate digital rights management technology from the Zune music player.
Microsoft stirred some controversy last week by announcing that it would no longer issue DRM keys for defunct MSN Music after August 31. This effectively will prevent former customers from transferring their songs to new devices after the deadline. Customers could potentially lose their music if they get a new computer or if the hard drive crashes on their current one.
EFF, an advocacy group for Internet users, said in a statement that it sent a letter to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer on Tuesday outlining steps the company should take, such as issuing refunds and launching a publicity campaign to educate former MSN Music customers about their options.
"MSN Music customers trusted Microsoft when it said that this was a safe way to buy music, and that trust has been betrayed," Corynne McSherry, an EFF attorney, said in a statement. "If Microsoft is prepared to treat MSN Music customers like this, is there any reason to suppose that future customers won't get the same treatment?"
In an interview last week with CNET News.com, Microsoft's Rob Bennett said that continuing to support the DRM keys was impractical, that the issue only affects a small number of people, and focusing exclusively on Zune was the best way to go. He also noted that it wasn't Microsoft's decision to wrap music into digital rights management.
A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment.
Microsoft has suggested that customers should back up their music libraries by burning them to CDs; this way, they can always transfer them to a new computer.
"Microsoft is asking its customers to spend more time, labor, and money to make degraded copies of music that was purchased in good faith," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele.
Like many in the blogosphere, EFF said the situation proves that DRM doesn't work.
"With MSN Music, Microsoft has admitted just how expensive, clumsy, and unfair DRM is," McSherry said in the statement. "It's time for Microsoft to reject this sloppy technology, and for customers to demand something better."
Happier times: The launch of the Swatch Paparazzi in New York.
(Credit: Microsoft)It's a sad day for fans of Smart Watches, which use Microsoft's once-hyped SPOT technology. The Smart Watch, the epitome of nerd chic, is dead.
Engadget picked up a blog post from Jon Canan, program manager for MSN Direct, who delivered the news on SpotStop.com:
... Read more
Rob Bennett knew people were going to be angry.
Bennett is the Microsoft executive who notified former customers of the now defunct MSN Music service on Tuesday that the company would no longer issue DRM keys for their songs after August 31. This means that, while former customers can listen to their music on authorized computers for as long as the hardware lasts, they won't be able to transfer songs to a new PC after that deadline.
In an interview with CNET News.com, Bennett said that continuing to support the DRM keys was impractical, that the issue only affects a "small number" of people and that focusing exclusively on Zune was the best way to go. He also noted that it wasn't Microsoft's decision to wrap music into digital rights management.
The reason for shutting down the DRM-licensing servers was "every time there is an OS upgrade, the DRM equation gets complex very quickly," said Bennett, general manager of entertainment, video, and sports for MSN. "Every time, you saw support issues. People would call in because they couldn't download licenses. We had to write new code, new configurations each time...We really believe that, going forward, the best thing to do is focus exclusively on Zune."
Microsoft shut down MSN Music in November 2006, following a failed effort to turn the site into a legitimate iTunes challenger. Redmond threw its resources behind the Zune digital music player and its music store, Marketplace.
For the past 18 months, Microsoft has continued to enable former customers of MSN Music to move their song libraries to new computers. Discontinuing that service has been widely criticized. Critics have long said that DRM was a means to control legally purchased music at the expense of consumers. To them, the current situation with MSN proves it.
Bennett defended Microsoft. He said the company never wanted DRM on its songs.
"Had we had the ability to deliver DRM-free tracks at the time, we absolutely would have done that," Bennett said. "We talked to the labels at the time about that. As a company, we have continued to push for this. Zune has a subset in their catalog of DRM-free MP3s. Now, the industry is making progress. The labels are understanding the downside of DRM when its used the way they wanted to use it, they end up punishing the users who bought music legally more than those who want to circumvent the system."
Bennett added that Microsoft believes in protecting intellectual property, but the company also wants people to enjoy their media without unreasonable restrictions.
"No one ever foresaw being in this situation," Bennett said. "It's not something we like to do. We want to make it easy and as painless for our customers as possible. We really feel, in the long term, what's best for people who want to buy music from Microsoft is to move to Zune."
Bennett said that former MSN Music customers can back up their songs by burning them to CDs. But what about the loss of sound quality should they decide to rerip the music?
"We (delivered) music at 160 kbps," Bennett said. "In my personal (experience), you're not going to lose that much fidelity."
Microsoft handed plenty of ammunition to the anti-DRM crowd on Tuesday by announcing it will no longer furnish authorization keys for songs purchased from the defunct MSN Music service.
For former customers of MSN Music--the service Microsoft operated before closing it in late 2006 and opening Zune Marketplace--August 31 will be the last day that they can move music to different computers. After that, Microsoft will no longer "support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased on MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," the company said in an e-mail to former MSN Music customers.
It's important to note that the music won't disappear after the deadline. Songs will continue to play on authorized computers. What the announcement means is that former MSN Music customers will risk losing their music libraries if they try to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or swap operating systems after Aug. 31.
There are a couple of ways to safeguard the music but they aren't pretty. Before the deadline, those affected can move songs to computers they plan to own for a while (the songs can be authorized to play on five different PCs). Another alternative is to burn songs to CDs and rerip. This means the loss of sound quality but offers more peace of mind.
Bloggers pounced on the news, writing that the situation illustrated just how anti-consumer that digital rights management is. The point most of them made: whatever hardware the songs are stored on will malfunction eventually, and the owner's music (in a high quality form at least) will be gone forever.
"Ultimately, this serves as a reminder of what DRM really is," wrote Justin Mann at TechSpot.com. It's a "way for companies to control your use of their content. Rather than purchasing, you are renting."
Microsoft said in the e-mail that it is shutting down the servers that operated the music's DRM but didn't specify why. A call to a Microsoft representative was not returned Tuesday night.
This is only the latest sign that DRM is apparently on its way out. The music industry appears to be drifting away from copy-protection schemes and has enabled several retailers, including Amazon.com, to sell DRM-free music files.
MSN Music was a failed effort by Microsoft to compete against Apple's iTunes. In November 2006, two years after opening it's doors, the service stopped selling downloads. Microsoft began redirecting customers to Zune's Marketplace music store or RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription service.
What will Google's Schmidt have to say about the first quarter? We'll find out Thursday.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Google's first-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, just got a lot more interesting.
Late Tuesday night, those Internet traffic trackers at ComScore put out some lousy news: growth in paid-search clicks in the United States is slowing down.
In fairness to Google, it did better than its competitors, according to a JPMorgan report issued Wednesday morning. (ComScore's paid-click numbers are not typically issued directly to public. We hear about them when Wall Street analysts issue their own reports on the data.)
Paid-search clicks at Google were up 2.7 percent in March, compared to the same month a year ago. That means that growth for the full quarter was just 1.8 percent year over year, a rapid drop from 25 percent year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. (Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good take on the worst-case scenario for Google's first quarter.)
But competitors did worse. Yahoo paid clicks declined 3.1 percent year over year in March (all percentages are year-over-year comparisons), though for the quarter, paid clicks at Yahoo grew 5.4 percent, also marking a drop-off from the fourth quarter's 9.8 percent growth.
At Microsoft's MSN, the news was flat-out bad. Paid clicks in March dropped 15.1 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 12.3 percent. At AOL, March paid clicks dropped 2.3 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 5.8 percent--a noticeable turnaround from the 29.3 percent drop in the fourth quarter.
In total, the market wasn't healthy. In March, it declined 1.5 percent. For the quarter, it managed 0.3 percent growth, versus a 15.8 percent increase in the fourth quarter.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the ComScore results have any correlation to Google's financial results. Similarly disappointing news earlier this year led to a significant drop in Google's share price. In fact, since November, Google shares have dropped about 40 percent since hitting $747.24.
So far, there's certainly no panicking because of the ComScore numbers. Google was up about 2 percent to $456.20 in midday trading Wednesday.
Analysts and Google pundits are split on what the ComScore numbers mean. Google maintains that its deceleration has more to do with its efforts to improve the quality of its ad leads (which should drive up average selling prices) than a broader economic slowdown. But disappointing numbers at all the major search sites may indicate that there's a broader economic explanation than Google's improved quality control. Is the paid-search advertising business as immune to a sour community as Google executives like to believe? We'll find out tomorrow.
Google, of course, is one of those big tech companies people closely follow in order to get a read on the health of the high-tech industry. We watch Google's results more closely than any other Internet company for good reason: because of its dominant search market share, Google is a good indicator of the health of Internet advertising. A slowdown at Google can be a sign of big trouble ahead for smaller companies.
On Tuesday afternoon, Intel executives signaled confidence in the coming year. IBM, another one of those tech bellwethers, reports its first-quarter earnings after the stock market closes this afternoon.
So by the end of this week, we'll have a better sense of whether it's time for tech companies to batten down the hatches.
Google's Webmaster Central has become a very important resource for anyone who has a Web site, works on a Web site, or, like SEO practitioners, helps others with their Web sites.
Google continues to roll out more features and better functionality to existing features, and now they just did a little bit of both with the addition of their Generate robots.txt function.
Google had previously added a robots.txt analyzer, which at this point is still the more useful of the two tools. For those who aren't aware, the robots exclusion protocol helps with instructing search engines how to interact with a Web site. There are a number of directives available, but the main purpose of the robots.txt file is to instruct the search engines about content that a site owner doesn't want the robots to crawl.
Why in the world would you not want search engines to crawl any of your content? You may have content that, for whatever reason, you don't want others to find through search results. Note, however, that this is not the same as secure information that requires authentication through a log-in.
Your site may have its own search function that creates "search results" for your site. Search engines generally do not want to include search results within search results, so this content may not be returned for searches on the engines anyway, so you might want to focus the crawlers elsewhere for greater crawler efficiency.
Or you may have duplicate content issues that you could use robots.txt to filter out. This is especially common with a content management system (CMS) that creates a separate printer-friendly page.
Regardless of your specific needs, having a robots.txt file can be important to a site. Rarely is there a site that can't benefit from disallowing at least some content. Even if you have nothing to disallow, you may want to take advantage of the auto-discovery feature for your XML sitemap. Finally, depending on your server log system or analytics package, not having a robots.txt file can be problematic if it inflates your "404 File Not Found" error reporting, which can happen because search engine spiders will request the robots.txt file automatically when they come to your site.
Right now, the robots.txt generator is rather basic and I hope that Google will add more features to it going forward. Currently, site owners have to paste in URLs and URL patterns to build the file. It would be great if it would provide a list of URLs or patterns extracted from a site to help automate the procedure for anyone not familiar with the protocol.
There is more information about the protocol, though a bit more on the technical side, at the robotstxt.org site and you can find more engine specific information on crawling and robots.txt from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.
One important tip is that the following directive tells all spiders they are allowed to go anywhere:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
And, more importantly, the following directive, which I sometimes see when I think people really wanted the above:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The latter tells the spiders to stay out of the entire site--clearly two very different results, so be sure you understand which does what.
One of the first things Microsoft did when launching the new Zune was kill the 2-year-old MSN Music download service.
The business reasons were plain: MSN Music was a PlaysForSure service, but the Zune wasn't PlaysForSure-compatible, and it came with its own music download service, integrated into the Zune software.
Sure, there's still something with the brand name MSN Music, but it's basically a shell--a few music videos, some promotional tie-ins with Zune (through a program called Ignition), and a radio station powered by Pandora.
If Microsoft's smart, it'll keep LaunchCast around.
(Credit: Yahoo)So what might that mean for Yahoo Music, if Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo clears? Probably not much, at first.
Microsoft's Kevin Johnson, who leads the group responsible for online services and Windows, mentioned in a conference call that the company would get the quickest benefits from combining their advertising platforms, particularly paid search: "scale economics can kick in fairly rapidly when you just look at the simple step of just combining the search-related ad inventory on a single ad platform."
Translation: as soon as the acquisition closes, Yahoo Search would be folded into Microsoft's Live Search, and Panama would be folded into AdCenter.
Eventually, though, Microsoft would go through all the other Yahoo divisions, looking for overlap or strategic misfits. Here's where Yahoo Music could feel the heat. Selling PlaysForSure-protected files does nothing for the Zune, and even if Yahoo goes with DRM-free MP3 files, it would seem to be redundant with the Zune Marketplace.
Now, if Microsoft were smart, it would recognize the popularity of the combined Yahoo Music and LaunchCast (see Aribtron's online-radio ratings). But often, decisions in acquisitions are driven by politics and emotion rather than actual business logic.
Editors' note: Yahoo on Monday announced that it is discontinuing its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service, transferring its customers to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service.
MSN, please say it isn't so.
As earlier reported, the MSN Live Search team had reinstated the link queries, though with a twist... now requiring a "+" in front of either the link: or linkdomain: query operators. But now it appears that the query is no longer working again.
But right now, it appears there is no love to be found at MSN for link queries:
Live Search link query results.
Nor linkdomain queries:
Live Search linkdomain query results.
Hopefully, this is just a glitch, but if not, then hopefully the Live Search team will make up their minds once and for all and either reinstate the special queries or kill them altogether.
The problem is that search marketers and Web site owners alike use these queries to measure and benchmark their visibility on the Web, as well as the success of their link building. These queries were originally decommissioned due to extreme load from automated queries.
Now that MSN has launched its new Webmaster Center, there is a thought that it will build this into its interface. While this may help alleviate the automated queries, it will probably be limited to the site that is validated within Webmaster Center. Unfortunately, this means that there won't be any way to measure against similar or competitor sites.
Games always seem to capture a lot of attention this time of year, in part because of kids and toys for Christmas or adults and getting together for the holidays. It would seem that search marketers enjoy games, too. While this often revolves around contests or challenges to get a site to rank No. 1 in the SERPs, at PubCon this year, SEOmoz even got some search marketers to unplug long enough to play an SEO version of Werewolf.
With only a week before Christmas, I couldn't help but wonder what games might be dancing around in search marketer's minds. While these classic renditions probably haven't made it to the shelves yet, maybe this will plant the seed for next season.
When it comes to games, it's hard to beat the classics, of course...so here are 10 searchized-games for search marketers:
Connect Four Reciprocal Links — (based on the classic Connect Four game), This game is based on the outdated concept of reciprocal linking. The winner is the one who can create the biggest reciprocal linking circle. Of course, this game is purely for fun.
Battleship Text Link Buys — (based on the classic game of Battleship) This text-link-buy smack-down game puts each opponent in the role of seeking out the other's text link buys and reporting them to Google. The one who sinks the other's PageRank first is the winner.
Keyword Scrabble — (based on the classic Scrabble game) Keywords are a foundation of the search world. Players take turns building on keyword phrases, earning points based on the smallest keyword phrase that achieves the highest rank in Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
Twister Search Career — (based on the zany classic Twister) Like any industry, the search industry often features moving from one company to another. In this game, instead of colored circles, the playing mat features company logos. Just like the Web industry, each player must reach out and touch a number of different company logos, constantly moving from one company to another without falling down.
SERPs Memory — (based on the age-old game of Memory) Test your visual and memory skills by viewing a listing of top-10 SERPs from Google, Yahoo, and MSN before they disappear, and then matching up the listings across the SERPs. The one who gets the most matching results across the engines wins.
Spammer Mouse Trap — (based on the fun game of Mouse Trap) Ever wonder what a day in the life of Matt Cutts would be like? Find out with this exciting game where you get to build a trap to catch search spammers.
Search Operation — (based on the nerve-racking game of Operation) Search marketers have to have nerves of steal when every move they make can result in a site plummeting in the SERPs. Test your skill by removing bad bits and pieces from a Web page; but be careful--alert the spiders and you may get a shock.
Stratego Search Position — (based on the battle strategy game of Stratego) Search marketing, like most forms of marketing, is often a matter of strategy. Position and move your Web pages to overthrow your competition, gaining stronger search positioning, winning more site visitors, and achieving the highest ROI.
The Game of Life Search — (based on The Game of Life) One of my favorites growing up, this version has you go through the life of a search marketer, mastering your trade, building your skills, moving from company to company and site to site to achieve your search life goals.
And quite possible the grandest game of all...
Search Monopoly — (based on the classic game of Monopoly) This game can provide hours of fun and is one of the most involved of search games. Chose your playing piece, from exciting favorites like white hat, black hat, Googlebot, Slurp, or MSNbot, and work your way around the game board, accumulating Web properties. Beware--landing on a Made-For-AdSense site or SPLOG can cost you, as can landing in the Google sandbox. Pull a Chance card and find that "Matt Cutts caught you buying Text Links. Lose two PageRank points and wait a turn to file for re-inclusion." But it isn't all bad...pull a card from the Community Chest and you may find that you "Win a one year SEOmoz Premium Membership," or "A free pass to SMX." The winner, of course, is the one who accumulates the most Web properties and finishes with the largest amount in VC funding.
As far as I know, none of these games exist yet, but a lot can happen between now and next year.
*All of these game concepts are based on related games that are the property of Hasbro. Until these games exist, you'll just have to buy the classics and pretend or modify to make your own.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--In the wake of Yahoo's corporate troubles, and the long-ago collapses of sites and services like AltaVista, Excite, and others, some may be tempted to think that the era of the portal has come and gone.
Not so, says Microsoft's MSN.
In fact, Joanne Bradford, MSN's corporate vice president and chief media officer, said that around her shop, people look at all kinds of sites, including Facebook, MySpace.com, and YouTube as portals, and that these days, MSN's own plan revolves around a portal-like existence.
"Everything is starting to look like portals," Bradford said Wednesday at the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Innovations conference here. "We call it the stuffing the tail back into the head strategy."
She was referring to the reverse of the so-called long-tail effect.
For Bradford, who was interviewed on-stage at the conference by Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney, we're in a new era where Web users want data and information filtered for them.
"People want you to do it for them," she said. "They're lazy. It's a society of convenience."
Fortunately, she suggested, MSN is here to help.
And in doing so, Bradford seemed to suggest, MSN is helping to create a dynamic where the most important and relevant information is presented to users, rather than relying on the long-tail to satisfy large numbers of users who want less popular information.
And by presenting the most important information in a way that is accessible and relevant, MSN is hoping it can benefit by similarly attracting top advertisers.
"The growth is still there," she said. "Advertisers want the head. Advertisers will still pay 10x for the head instead of the tail."
And while MSN is operating in the middle of a time when many people do see portals as having gone the way of the dot-com start-up with no viable business plan, that's just fine with Bradford and her colleagues.
They may not shout to the world that they're doing so, she seemed to be saying, but by pursuing partnerships with all kinds of content developers that will make MSN relevant to the widest number of its users, MSN's decision-makers do appear to be relying on the basic portal structure.
"I don't mind that people say that portals are dead," she said, "because it lets us do a bunch of experimentation without being under the spotlight."
