Something I hadn’t quite twigged about Telstra BigPond’s new music download service was that it can’t be accessed by Macs. An earlier entry in my Blog noted Telstra’s claim their service was unique, I think I posited the uniqueness was probably that it couldn’t be used with iPods, the besy selling, most popular portable music player in the world. iPods of course are produced by Apple.

BigPond decided to go with a proprietary format from Windows.

BigPond’s exclusive use of a proprietary format also means that an estimated 15 per cent of potential buyers cannot even browse the site because they use Apple Macs.

That estimate is open to debate, but most PCs in Australia and worldwide, are in offices where bosses generally prefer the help not to download music all day, and Mac users are keener users of cyberspace than PC owners.