I watched the Bill Gates keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show last night. Well, most of it, anyway. The high-speed feed had a little trouble keeping up with the demand, so I occasionally lost the picture. But I saw a few things I liked, and Conan O’Brien was a good foil for Gates, better than Jay Leno.
Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has the best high-level summary of what the various announcements all mean. Read Microsoft CES: Clarifying the Message for the details.
One quibble with Joe’s otherwise-excellent report. He writes, “Apple’s iTunes supports MP3 better than WMP 10, which requires third-party MP3 encoder support to rip to the format.
This is not true. A basic installation of WMP 10 includes full support for the MP3 format at bit rates of up to 320K with no additional software required, either from Microsoft or third parties. The default format is WMA, but it takes one click in a dialog box to choose MP3 as the default format.
Update: I sent a note to Joe, and after we exchanged a few e-mails he edited his original report.
By the way, Microsoft announced that there have been 90 million downloads of Windows Media Player 10 in less than four months. That’s a staggering number. To put it into perspective: The folks at Mozilla.org are justifiably proud that they had 15 million downloads of Firefox in just under two months. And no one is questioning that Firefox is an enormous hit and a big story.
Ed Bott 
The download rate for Windows Media Player is bound to be higher. WMP is integrated into Windows and has an update function built into it by default. When you’ve played a file or a DVD on an older version, it prompts you asking to upgrade, and even if you click No it’ll keep on prompting.
With Firefox, you actually have to go out and want to download it. What would be more telling would be the number of people who downloaded Windows Media Player after choosing to download it from Microsoft’s web site.
Sorry, Neil, that’s not true. WMP9 does not automatically prompt the user to upgrade to WMP10. I have a test computer here that has been running WMP9 forever and just checked it again. No prompt.
The WMP10 upgrade is available from the Optional Updates portion of Windows Update. It’s also been heavily featured on the MSN home page (the default home page for IE6 users) and on the Media Guide page of WMP. But I have never seen any reports of users being “prompted” to update simply by playing a file or a CD. I haven’t tested with DVDs, so I can’t say that for sure.
If you have a specific reproducible scenario that I can try, please pass along the details.
Odd – this has happened on most of the computers I have used. The window that asks for the update is called ‘Windows Media Configuration Utility’ and certainly on the machines that I have used it would pop up at least once per session. My update settings were at their defaults upon installation.
It could be something specific to how I’ve set my computers up, though. Unfortunately all my machines are now running 10 so I cannot reproduce this.
If we’re talking about the same thing, the Windows Media Configuration Utility is the “first run” wizard that comes up when you use Windows Media Player for the first time. It allows you to set privacy options and file associations. It doesn’t offer updates to a new version.
Are you sure Joe edit his report? My view of his web page still shows the false information. Which means I’ll have to take the information on his site with a serious grain of salt now, as he doesn’t seem to make corrections when he’s wrong.
Please let me know if I missed it but I don’t see it.
Oh, and as a music consumer I do care about choice. Just like any other product I buy. I like to go to the store that serves my needs best, be that price, availablilty, selection or service. So I don’t know what Joe is smokin’
If you read the Windowsmedia newsgroups, you’ll see that a very high number of posters are downloading and re-downloading WMP v10 over and over again to fix configuration problems. My recommendation is to avoid this “upgrade” or rollback to v9.
Yeah, Joe rewrote the section of his report. It now reads: “And Apple’s iTunes supports MP3 better than WMP, which in pre-WMP 10 versions requires third-party MP3 encoder support to rip to the format.”
Of course, I disagree with this, but at least it’s no longer technically inaccurate. WMP has always played back MP3 and WMA formats, and the option to rip in either format has been there. In Apple’s player, you can’t use WMA files, period. And of course their DRM-protected filed will play nowhere else.
Apple makes beautiful products, but I don’t agree that their choice of music formats is somehow more pro-consumer.
Ed, Neil,
I found this (Ed’s) site as I googled for “Windows Media Configuration Utility”. I am looking for info on this because this program does indeed prompt at the start of every WMP version 9 session (I am running XP Home (SP2)) to go out to the internet and presumably look for updates, or who knows what. I have ZoneAlarm set to pretty much deny or ask permission for all programs before accessing the ‘net (except IE and e-mail, of course), and it definitely asks me everty time. I imagine it would download WMP 10 if I let it, and I may do so, now that I sort of know what it is. So, sorry Ed, but Neil would appear to be correct.
My point is that Windows itself does not automatically install this Critical Update. If you use WMP as your default player, it will offer to check for updates, but someone who doesn’t use WMP as their default player will never see that message.