Apple has led the way in legal music and television show downloads, offering a standard of 99 cents per song, $1.99 for a video or show. The logical next step that everyone expects the company to take is to jump to full-length feature films, and in what appears to be a trial run, Apple has offered a TV movie for the price of $9.99. While that may have seemed steep in comparison to the per song price, it still makes sense, especially if you factor in time to download, time to watch, etc. In comparison, what makes no sense whatsoever is Universal's recently proposed "download to own" service. While one of the earlier announcements, Universal is requesting customers pay $17.50 for older films, and $35 apiece for new downloads. Wow. That is a serious cost, one I can't see paying at all! Barring the company offering new films with major actors on the Web before they hit the theaters, I just don't see the country's movie fanatics embracing this service. The charges will leave your wallet wishing you hit the theater and got a large popcorn, movie nachos and a drink for you and a date. Even that would cost less.

I stayed off of the bandwagon dumping on Microsoft for their recent announcements that their "next generation" operating system, Vista, would be delayed through 2007, because kicking Microsoft when they have issues is just too easy. But tonight, we see that they simply don't have their act together at all - announcing a similar delay in their planned Office 2007 software suite, also until 2007.

With revenue from the Windows operating system and Office suite being Microsoft's two primary cash cows for the better part of two decades, any delays for the software monopoly behemoth impact the technology industry as a whole - from consumers and businesses timing upgrades to the OEM partners of the Redmond giant, who cannot count on a spike in this year's holiday season where they were before.

You know where my allegiances lie - Apple has made a superior operating system and user experience for a long time now, and continues to extend the lead. With delays on Microsoft's end, Apple's feature differentiation will be even more significant, and now they run on Intel, eliminating yet another barrier for some to the Macintosh platform. While I don't want to express too much schaudenfreude in Microsoft's plight, I can't argue that I'm surprised or disappointed.

Whatever my excuses are - whether it's being at the office too long, or letting TiVo and the Internet (this site included) take over my available hours, I'm simply not reading books and magazines as much as I should and have historically. As a result, some very good books are piling up, in my "to do" pile, and there's not been much movement.

1. Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas
2. The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken
3. The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
4. 2006 Oakland Athletics Media Guide (picked this up at Spring Training)
5. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
6. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
7. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
8. The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
9. Trump - The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump (duh)
10. Sharing Good Times by Jimmy Carter

It's been said one of the key elements to any successful product is to know your market and to tailor your offerings in such a way that the market will respond. Contributing factors can be a number of things, ranging from a first-mover advantage, an enhanced feature set or simply better packaging.

Such was the case with yesterday's announcement that I had received my A's 2006 season tickets. While that yearly rite of passage may seem uneventful, especially given that I paid good money for those tickets, and should expect to get them anyway, it was something I had been looking forward to, and for some reason, I just so happened to receive my shipment a day or more before anybody else I know has. With some quick camera work, I summarized this year's seasonal ticket book, and posted the photos to the site - using yet another untapped feature of RapidWeaver - the software behind this blog.

As mentioned yesterday, I posted the images and a quick intro to the Athletics Nation site, but the response has been more than ridiculous. Prior to this week, site traffic to louisgray.com had plugged along around 20 visits a day - topped by Monday's 130 or so spike. While today's traffic so far has seen "only" 120 unique visits, the number of pages viewed by each visitor has increased significantly, with some viewing 16 to 18 pages, literally clicking through every photo to see every picture in slideshow mode. As such, we've seen 315 page views from midnight through 8:00 p.m., with the previous record being Monday with just over 130.

Meanwhile, over at Athletics Nation, my post turned into a sounding board for all those looking to receive their tickets, some with real-time updates on where their FedEx shipments were. 82 comments later, the post has far outstripped any level of attention the ANtics comics regularly receive. Now that's comical...