PlaysForSure and Wikipedia — Revisionism At Its Finest

2011.08.30   prev     next

As of today (and for quite some time, I think), the Wikipedia article on Microsoft’s PlaysForSure initiative contains:

• Zero mention of Apple.

• Zero mention of iTunes.

• One very sideways reference to the iPod, in the last entry of a section describing software that can stream media to PlaysForSure devices, as follows: “SimpleCenter supports the media devices iPod, Sony PSP, Xbox 360, Nokia N80, N93, USB mass storage, and PlaysForSure certified devices".” No other mention of iPod in the entire article.

And the cancellation of PlaysForSure after three years of failure is very briefly described as the program being “rebranded and scaled back.”

Wikipedia presents itself as an unopinionated, just-tell-the-facts, encyclopedic reference, which makes this game all the worse. If a massively distorted, revisionist history of PlaysForSure was found on a site written by Rob Enderle or Paul Thurrott, I wouldn’t think anything of it — but in an authorless, authoritative reference?

Think about it: If you didn’t know anything about PlaysForSure, and you Googled it, and found this Wikipedia page, then read it from start to finish, you would probably think you had a good, basic background of the subject. But you wouldn’t know that PlaysForSure was in any way intended to compete with Apple, the iPod, or iTunes. Nor would you know that PlaysForSure had failed, or that it was cancelled, or that Microsoft’s PlaysForSure partners were backstabbed by Microsoft’s Zune. And you would have no knowledge that PlaysForSure was intended to reproduce the 1980s niche-ization of Apple at the hands of the widely licensed Windows OS. And of course, you wouldn’t know that when PlaysForSure was launched, large numbers of industry pundits expressed complete confidence that such re-niche-ization of Apple would be the result of PlaysForSure.

Somehow, the entire subject of PlaysForSure on Wikipedia has fallen under the absolute control of persons who want to erase Microsoft failure (and/or Apple success) from history.

It would be nice to think that this article is a rare exception on Wikipedia, but that’s very hard for me to believe. There are plenty of subjects that people have passionate opinions about — many much stronger than “PlaysForSure” — and I’m betting Wikipedia is rife with this kind of thing, or worse. That’s why Wikipedia, despite all its successes, will never replace Google, as some industry observers thought it might.