I worked on one of the biggest selling music players that used PlaysForSure, and every other piece of hardware was junk taking seconds to start playing DRM'd tr

I worked on one of the biggest selling music players that used PlaysForSure, and every other piece of hardware was junk taking seconds to start playing DRM'd tracks, etc. Janus/PlaysForSure was just a library that vendors like Creative/etc dumped into the low perf, crappy design "music player reference code" they got from the SoC vendor and hacked up on. The media player guys didn't own their technology in any meaningful way. Zune could have been amazing! They had a nice big screen, a hardware accelerated UI with rich transitions. They were lightyears ahead of Apple/iPod on technology. Obviously they completely bombed in the market, but imagine if they had found success because of their better technology -- it would have been really hard for Apple to respond since the iPod OS was such a low level affair (plus Apple never would have made a brown iPod!).