Xbox Music launched last year as the successor to Zune Music. I'll be writing more about specific Microsoft apps you can find on Android and iOS in the near future, but here let's just look at a single example, which is interesting because it's sort of unexpected: Xbox Music. With the wider world turning to competing mobile platforms like Android and, to a much lesser extent, iOS, Microsoft has been at the forefront of what I think of as the modern cross-platform age. We're seeing Office makes inroads on the web, the iPhone and Android handsets, and next year we can expect touch-first versions of the software for Windows and the iPad. We have mature digital media ecosystems from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft from which to choose. Today, we juggle PCs with an increasingly complex web of smart phones, tablets, video game consoles and other devices. Microsoft has long supplied a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, for example, and iTunes and the iPod didn't take off until Apple ported the digital media software to Windows, which was at the time the single dominant personal computing platform. Some of this stuff has been going on for a long time, of course. But these are just the latest in an increasingly long line of cross-platform releases that make it easier than ever for us to choose how we wish to mix and match devices and services. What triggered this was two software releases today that don't seem, on the surface, to impact readers of this site at all: Google Music for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) and Amazon Instant Video for the Sony PlayStation 4. And you can increasingly mix and match your ecosystem choices at will, using the devices and services you prefer. Just a short time ago, the mobile platform ecosystem story was easily explained: You could only get the best experience if you stuck within the confines of what Apple, Google or Microsoft offered you on the respective platforms.
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