nsane.forums Posted June 24, 2012 Share Posted June 24, 2012 15 years on, Winamp still lives—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping. Tens of millions of Winamp users are still out there. MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience. Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge. Winamp's 15-year anniversary is now upon us, with little fanfare. It’s almost as if the Internet has forgotten about the upstart with the odd slogan that looked at one time like it would be the company to revolutionize digital music. It certainly had the opportunity. “There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition,” Rob Lord, the first general manager of Winamp, and its first-ever hire, told Ars. Justin Frankel, Winamp's primary developer, seems to concur in an interview he gave to BetaNews. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) “I'm always hoping that they will come around and realize that they're killing [Winamp] and find a better way, but AOL always seems too bogged down with all of their internal politics to get anything done,” he said. The problems began early, since Nullsoft wasn't interested in being a traditional corporate unit. For instance, in 2000, just a year after the acquisition, Frankel released (and open sourced) Gnutella, a new “headless” peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that understandably steamed the bigwigs at AOL corporate headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. By early 2004, Rolling Stone dubbed Nullsoft’s founder the “world’s most dangerous geek”—but companies like AOL aren't good fits for dangerous geeks. That same year, Frankel resigned, writing on his website a few lines that were later removed: "For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave." Today, Winamp continues to be updated; AOL released its first Android version in 2010 and a Mac version in 2011. Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. And Winamp still has an estimated user base of millions worldwide, a small fraction of which live in the United States. However, references to the application’s storied history, both good and bad, have been scrubbed or omitted from the Winamp current site—it’s just a big blank page. So how exactly did Winamp squander the incredible head start it had on most other Internet music businesses? Here's how. Article continued at source (link below).... View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mosaji Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Great story...though never used winamp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calguyhunk Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 ...never used winamp Used Winamp as the only media player on a Win95/98/XP machine. :) Those were the days I was just learning 'bout the whole PC thing as a school kid. And PC hardware was thrice as expensive :angry: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eqagunn Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 I still use WinAmp, here is how mine looks:http://i45.tinypic.com/2jeu0bb.jpg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alanon Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Tried it first on the latter versions, so I really hated it. foobar2000 or AIMP man myself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Seeker Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Before I discovered foobar2000, Winamp 2.91 was the bomb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eqagunn Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 I still use WinAmp, here is how mine looks: http://i45.tinypic.com/2jeu0bb.jpgG i mme that skin you got please! :dribble: Well ok, here you go then: ClassicPro + Insekticid Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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