Rest of industry slowly catching on to A le's music integration a roach

RealNetwork's CEO Rob Glaser, always one to fire off a comment when he tricks himself into thinking the industry is listening, might be one of the first major partners of Microsoft to publicly expre , erm, 'disa ointment' with the Redmond company's all-in-one a roach with their Zune music player and service, slated to be delivered... oh I du o, some day: "We think this a case where our technology competitors, in this case ecifically Microsoft, have literally thrown the baby out with the bath water." This might also be the first time Microsoft has been accused of literally throwing out a baby, along with other features and products, such as most of Vista WinFS.

But here's the interesting part: Rob then goes on to threaten (hehe, i 't he cute?) that this gives RealNetworks the o ortunity to go find other hardware companies who are "open to integrating tightly with our Rha ody software platform". Discu ion as to whether RealNetworks has even 1 full percentage point of the digital music market aside, it sounds like, after four years, su osed competitors to the iPod + iTunes platform (since when was Microsoft a hardware company?*) are catching on to the po ibility that the whole 'integration' strategy A le uses might actually be a good idea. However, time will have to tell whether this 9th i ing enlightenment will pay off for any of these companies.

[* - Microsoft's mice and keyboards (and po ibly other peripherals) don't count. Last I heard, they're designed and built by HP.]