ericesque

Is anyone actually running the numbers or just experiencing sticker shock?  The article says he received $200M in stock options every 3 years. Even if you pretend he can leverage all of that stock and walk away with $200M it is only $66M per year. Divide that out across 12,000. You get $5,500. Great! Nobody sees a dollar in their paycheck and Google still owes about $66M just to cover benefits.

This article is 2494 characters long and has 404 words. 

 to make way for the ill-fated Zune Marketplace and other similarly abysmal content delivery products. 

Whoa whoa whoa! Hold on a minute.  Zune Marketplace was absolutely ill-fated.  But “abysmal content delivery product” is a gross mischaracterization.  By Gen 3 Microsoft, in 2008, had competitive hardware for the day and in most respects better software and services than Apple has in Apple Music today.  

Sure, Zune had long since been panned by consumer electronics blogs, but gen 3 hardware was legit.  The desktop software would still hold up against Spotify and Apple Music in terms of usability and vastly outclasses either in style.  The music exploration and recommendations were excellent.  I still miss the playback visualizations.  They had social features baked in and had a web music player that was a first class citizen in their ecosystem. You could cast music between devices before the word “casting” had been coined.  Zune Pass gave you access to unlimited streaming of 14 million tracks and let you keep 10 each month.  While Apple was raising digital downloads to $1.29/track, Microsoft was offering discounted annual subscriptions at $149.  It was the equivalent of buying 10 songs on iTunes each month plus $1.75/mo for unlimited streaming.

Zune lost the battle of mind share, but 13 years later I’m still waiting for someone to step up and revive the golden age of streaming music.

kkqd1337 said:

Can you change the default email app yet?

This doesn’t have to do with the beta supporting the feature. Developers have to update their apps to tell iOS they want to be included as an option for the default email app. 

lightvox88 said:

Exactly. It was already more than cable before, and now it's just ridiculous. 30% increase!?! Who would be interested in this? People with money to burn...