that’s whacked

Philips & Songbird

Friday, Jan 8. 2010  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

By now you’ve seen the news about our partnership with Philips.  Big chunks of the team have been cranking pretty hard on this partner release and we’re super excited to ship some things we’ve been working on for a while, and to get Songbird into the hands of even more users. The feedback has already been tremendous; thanks to everyone for your support!

As you know we’re big believers in openness and as such we try to share our development plans and progress with you as regularly and freely as we can. This isn’t as straightforward when other companies are involved — especially large, global, public companies like Philips. So we apologise for not being able to talk openly, sooner, about this new relationship but we hope, even as a bit of a surprise, you can appreciate why this is a good thing for the company, the products, the platform, and all of our users. As always we’ll strive to give you an early heads up whenever we can.

While there’s obviously some special work we’ll do for Philips, we don’t think about this as one-off work.  Much of what we do for them, is work we’ve been planning  to do for all Songbird consumers.  For Philips, there’s certainly a custom feather and the add-ons that are important to them and their customers. We’re working to make sure that all of what we build is valueable for you and for partners … with as few exceptions as possible.

Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us — it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and tradeoffs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have.  There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers. We know that users around the globe using the software and sending us their ideas ultimately results in a better experience for everyone. So keep your suggestions coming.

There’s no resting on this week’s milestone achievement, we’re working fast and furiously on the next release, which will hit early this year. Stay tuned for more as we move continue evolving plans and working through development.

Thanks again for all of your support!