I wasn't talking about them actually making your existing WMA files un-playable, I'm talking about getting support for WMA by being "open" and then closing it off so future releases don't work on your current player. For example, the way Word versions are rarely, if ever, backwards compatable. It's more of a mindshare thing than it is about the actual technology. Even if MS could somehow make WMA playback disappear from my empeg in the middle of the day, who cares? I can just go home and re-encode my own stuff. It's only a concern for stuff you get from friends, or off of the Internet.

I think that MP3 can probably provide the same quality playback that WMA ever will, it's a question of size. Maybe a short ways down the road, WMA files will be half the size of MP3's for the same quality. But as long as you're not out of disk space (and transfer speed is not a concern), who cares? I'll use MP3 until sometime better, open, AND more popular comes along.. or until I need to switch away for practical reasons (ie, disk space). With the cost of hard disks these days, I'm not sure that's ever going to be a factor for me.

Anyway, my main concern is the market share aspect of things, I don't want to see WMA become popular for being open, and then become closed. The result would be EVERYONE using WMA and you can't play it. Bait and switch sucks, even when it's just about market share and not about breaking your existing music.