You have to license AAC from parties other than Microsoft. Many other players apart from the iPod plays AAC - a great deal of mobile phones for a start, since it was developed for mobile telephony devices. Sony MP3 players plays AAC. Whether a device plays AAC is entirely up to the maker. They might have seen it as a futile effort as many people who bought the geekier multi-codec players did so because they wanted nothing to do with the iPod, including (foolishly for them) the codec it supports. I believe Sony was the first major-label, known MP3 maker to break that prejudice of sorts in mass-market devices.
I suspect that Microsoft ran out of patience looking at the also-rans that the other manufacturers & Playsforsure licensees churned out. In many cases the Playsforsure code wouldn't work reliably in these players due to issues with the player itself as well as issues with the Playsforsure delivery services. Whethe this was a Microsoft problem or a vendor problem, I couldn't say. I certainly came across these problems often. The biggest pointer to a potential exasperation with the existing manufacturers is probably the gradual drift away from the Playsforsure music vendors before news of the Zune broke, and the iRiver partnership with M$ which started off promisingly enough... but eventually M$ turned to Toshiba to make the Zune (and that has to be for firmware reasons as much as hardware).
If that was actually the case, it's quite possible that Microsoft actually decided to say '&%$# you, we're going to make something that actually works almost all the time like the iPod and the rest of you're not going to screw it for us anymore'. Rather like Steve casting off the clone-makers perhaps. As I said it's speculation but the pointers are there.
There are a few things wrong with your arguments. First, nobody cares what codecs a phone uses. You download a ringtone, and it rings, nobody cares how it does it. And you can't encode your own ringtones, at least the manufacturers will do whatever is in their power to keep you from encoding. In the music player market, Apple has always pushed AAC, and Apple is Microsoft's only competition, so whether it is just in the manufacturers mind, or in a hidden contract, or somewhere mentioned in negotiations, but never written down, none of them dared supporting iTunes by including an AAC codec instead of WMP.
And if there are problems with PlayForSure, shouldn't Microsofts music player be the first player that implements PlayForSure without any glitches? If PlayForSure doesn't work because all these manufacturers are too stupid to use it, shouldn't Microsoft demonstrate how good PlayForSure is by using it in their own player? They all paid lots of money for a license from Microsoft for a product which is now a second class citizen within Microsoft itself.
And of course if you view this within the original premise of this whole thread: Bill Gates claims that Apple is at a disadvantage because Apple does things on its own, while Microsoft relies on this huge array of third party manufacturers. Who all can't get PlayForSure to work, so Microsoft had to come out with the Zune. So according to you, Apple isn't really at a disadvantage, but Microsoft is, because all these third party manufacturers have three years time and don't get it right, and then Microsoft is three years late to the party.
