There's also the notion that WMA support might go away, or it might mutate into an incompatible form. Sure, the WMAs you made today will continue to work on today's WMA decoders, but what happens when you try to create WMAs years from now and they no longer work on the empeg or the WMAs you create today no longer work on tomorrow's decoders? With open technologies, that's not a problem. There will always be decoders around. (We can still play Zork and other Infocom games on basically any OS because we know how to decode them, for example.) But since WMA is totally closed, when Microsoft stops supporting it, you're pretty much SOL. Sure, you can play your 8-tracks on your 8-track deck, but no one's made any new tapes or decks in decades, and dusting it off is too much of a pain. But that becomes even worse when you have to find an old computer that will run the latest version of Windows that supported the WMA you want, install that OS, install the WMA support and encode, assuming you can find all of those things.