That is at least what a column at BusinessWeek claims. It states that through the cooperation between EMI and Apple, AAC will become more and more dominating and finally the industry standard. The author continues by blaming Microsoft (with more than a certain amount of right to do so) for its confusing DRM strategy, but somehow neglects to mention that it is Apple which is being accused of locking in customers and acting without the end-users best interest. He also makes a noble attempt at trying to locate as many AAC compatible players as possible, and yes there are quite a few today, but what he neglects to mention is that they all, excluding iPod, have MP3 as the primary and best optimized format. At the same time there are thousands and thousands of other players which also plays MP3, but not AAC.
While Microsoft has been presenting way too many DRM standards on its own, the rest of the industry has been just as ignorant. The difference between these actors and Apple is that the first party has decided to share its DRM technology, licenses or for free, to create a unified market. Apple has refused and is now somewhere in between a rock and the European Commission because of it. The cooperation with EMI has caused much of the media to react and once again praise Jobs for doing something we, the criticizers, have been doing for several years.
The lack of insight into the markets outside of the USA is quite remarkable as well. While the player manufacturers like Cowon, iRiver, Meizu, Archos, and more are living in the shadows of iPod in the USA they are flourishing and dominating in Europe and Asia, and there the focus has been on MP3 and broaden from that. AAC is not a technically superior format to MP3, the pure amount of MP3 songs are outweighs AAC many times over and there isn’t much that really speaks for AAC. It looks far from certain that AAC would become anything else but an iTunes format.
