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'Microsoft is doing some very aggressive things'

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Embrace, extend, extinguish. Analysts say these are the attributes of Microsoft's recent attempt to make its Windows Media Audio (WMA) the standard for digital music.

'What Microsoft did to the Web browser it is now doing to digital music,' said Andrew Rowsell-Jones, research director for GartnerGroup in Asia.

'It's embracing MP3 [Moving Picture Experts Group 1, Layer 3], extending it and finally it will extinguish it.'

Microsoft was seen as doing the same with its Internet Explorer, which stole the market share from Netscape's then market-leading browser in the late 1990s.

The MP3 standard was created in 1987 as a method for digitally compressing and delivering audio files. It became widely used during the 1990s, when different groups started sharing songs from CDs and posting them as files over the Internet.

Despite a proliferation of other competing standards, such as Liquid Audio and RealAudio in the market, MP3 is considered the most popular format in digital music. According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, at any one time, about one million MP3 tracks are being downloaded around the world.

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