Friday, January 9, 2004

Having worked at Compaq for a number of years, I was extremely surprised to see this news: Apple, HP team up on music players. From CBS MarketWatch. A strategic alliance between Apple and HP? iTunes to be pre-installed on HP PCs? That implies that QuickTime will also be factory installed on all these HP PCs. What I would like to know is whether Microsoft blessed this arrangement, since they are well known to be working on an iTunes-like program for Windows, and historically have been very successful at influencing OEMs. Perhaps HP now feels they are big enough to defy Microsoft, like IBM is doing with this internal memo which challenges employees to be Microsoft-free by the end of next year. The NY Times article says Microsoft executives were "stung." 7:25:45 AM

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