"That's the nice thing about standards. There are so many to choose from."

While DAAP or Airtunes as a de facto standard would be nice for Apple,
a real IEEE standard would be what the consumers want.

Of course, that would be not-so-nice for Apple, because Joe Consumer
would just pick Product X which is much cheaper than iPod, or Product Y
which has the particular whizzy feature he can't live without.

You would think that second-tier players (i.e., at the moment everyone but Apple)
would be ganging up to define this standard as fast as they could.
But Noooooooooooo.

Also, some of the standards you mention, such as Ethernet, are transport
standards. I'm thinking more of a protocol standard.
I.e., here is how we fetch the tags, this is the standard code for
"fast forward," etc.
As well as a connector standard, etc.

/music

P.S. No grousing about my 2nd Tier comment. I know other companies ship
vast volumes of non-hard-drive players, etc. But Apple has won the mindshare
war. "iPod" is the generic term used by many/most people for any MP3 player.
"I don't like it any more than you do. Some men you just can't reach."