MTV punishes Microsoft for abandoning PlaysForSure

I'm pretty sure that MTV's decision to dump Urge is a way to punish Microsoft for abandoning PlaysForSure.

It's hardly surprising that MTV has dumped its 'Urge' music partnership with Microsoft and hooked up with RealNetworks and Verizon. What would you do if you got stabbed in the back?

Paul McDougall goes on to say:

The bigger question is this: How can Microsoft ever again ask partners in the increasingly important online entertainment space to take its promises of ongoing support and compatibility seriously?

This is a very good question. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice ... well, you know the rest. Microsoft's overwhelming desire to create a hardware/software/store symbiotic ecosystem at the expense of its PlaysForSure partners (maybe because the writing was on the wall for the PlaysForSure DRM mechanism).

Microsoft's decision to cut PlaysForSure adrift as far as the Zune was concerned was a silly move, not just from a business perspective but also from a consumer choice point of view too. Microsoft might have been able to get away with this kind of stunt maybe five years ago, and then only if it had the dominance that Apple enjoys with the iPod and iTunes. The Zune was starting from scratch in an already crowded market that was dominated by the iPod. While I'm not particularly thrilled by the iTunes component of the iPod, I wouldn't bother with the Zune even if I was given a stack of them for free. I might change my mind if Rockbox came out with replacement firmware for the Zune, but for now I'm not interested in the least.

Microsoft's decision to abandon PlaysForSure on what seemed like a whim makes me wary of recommending that anyone buy audio and video from it.

Thoughts?