file sharing, once you count that, and the accompanying zero price, the concentration issues do not look so bad. On the other hand, shareholders should not worry if they don't get regulatory approval. I would expect a mess more than any significant cost savings, as the merger does not address the underlying problems faced by either company. November 06, 2003 C|Net News has an interesting piece on the incompatibilities created by the use of DRM ( Stalemate on digital content? ). The underlying video might be standard MPEG , but the differing DRM used by two different systems makes the formats incompatible. You can't listen to Windows Media Audio ( WMA ) on iPod , and you can't listen to Advanced Audio Coding ( AAC ) iTunes on anything but iTunes. This is sort of like the war between Beta and VHS, except here you have un-DRM-encumbered formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis . Are Microsoft and Apple secretly trying to reduce the market success of their licensed music downloads? First, why do you have to pay ($10) for this software? The HTML catalogs can easily be linked into the iTunes store, thus providing lots of free advertisement for iTunes and their licensed artists. I rather expect Apple and its now numerous rivals to provide this functionality in upcoming releases for free. Heck, I would imagine that they would host the catalogs free-of-charge. Second, where is the easy ability to publish playlists and the associated software that will let