AfterTek

It isn’t very often we hear Microsoft admitting to the world that they have a problem and they need to fix it. When they started with the Zune they told consumers that it would not interfere with their PlaysForSure program. They had hoped that they would be able to combine the two and make them compatible with each other through the use of their Windows Media Technology.

Microsoft was in a precarious place, though. It had lined up MTV Networks as a partner for its Urge service, which was to be part of Windows Vista. That service had not even formally launched yet, so it was tough to fully back away from its partnerships, even though the company was clearly planning to go it alone. This week, Microsoft confirmed, though, that it is no longer planning to fly the PlaysForSure banner. Instead, services and devices can seek the far more generic “Certified for Windows Vista” logo.

Conceived in 2004, PlaysForSure was aimed at helping consumers understand that a wide range of devices and digital music services could be used with one another, boosting a strategy of “choice” as compared with the tight link between iTunes and iPod. With Zune, though, Microsoft decided that Apple was right. There might have been and probably still is – merit to Microsoft’s original argument. The problem wasn’t the notion of PlaysForSure, it was the fact that the logo often overstated things. Not all PlaysForSure players could support subscription music, for example.