Microsoft’s Xbox Live music stream goes live today. With so many other options of music streaming available from Spotify, Amazon and Pandora what will make Xbox’s Live music stream standout. Will it be offered on cross platforms like iOS products, will be it acessible to older PC’sos ‘s like Windows 7. Microsoft failed before in the music market with it’s Zune lets see if they can step it up with it’s new music stream.
As the provided-by-Microsoft chart shows, the company is quick to tout Xbox Music’s wide range of offerings, but it glosses over the service’s major weakness — namely, platform support. The chart indicates “PC + Mobile + Home” support, which is technically true: Xbox Music is coming to the Xbox 360 on Tuesday, Windows 8-based tablets and PCs on October 26, Window Phone 8 “shortly after,” and other platforms “at a later date”.
Read between the lines and that means PC use is restricted not only to Windows PCs butWindows 8 PCs, and there aren’t any current plans for Windows 7 or OS X software. That’s a significant disadvantage when Spotify offers desktop software for both Mac and Windows, and most other competitors like Rhapsody, Rdio, and MOG work on any operating system with their browser-based software. (And there are reports that Spotify is developing a browser-based software as well.)
[cnet ]
