The key difference between what Adam’s talking about and my discussion is that he’s discussing codecs. Letting a thousand codecs bloom can be a very good thing – it can help us get better standards, promoting innovation and healthy competition. It’s (arguably) best if, to implement the standard, all you have to do is read a public specification, with second best being openly licensed standards like AAC, I suppose. A worse case would be if each codec was proprietary and strictly licensed, so that AAC could only be played on certain players, MP3 on others, and there would be no way for those players manufacturers to license the other codec. You can still get benefits from that competition, because ultimately it can still help the “better” standard win out (although that is not guaranteed), but it has more costs in terms of standards fragmentation.

In the case of DRM, however, the consumer gets no better quality from using one DRM over another. It doesn’t affect the sound quality. The only affect on consumers is indirect – DRM do differentiate on the basis of how flexible their rights languages are. But, in practice, this matters little, since the all the msuic services allow and restrict basically the same uses (with differentiation only between PPD v. subscription) – for the most part, FairPlay, Helix, and WMA locked files don’t differ all that much.

More to Adam’s point, in the case of the current DRM market, there are no simple “firmware” upgrades. The various DRM are not free public specs; ones like Apple’s, Real’s, and Sony’s are proprietary and only licensed for the company’s own software and hardware players. WMA is more widely licensed, but it is not an open industry standard like AAC.

Although I agree that rolling out yet another proprietary format and relying on market-wide acceptance isn’t a brilliant business model, I think letting a thousand formats bloom can be a good thing – as long as firmware upgrades are made available. Maybe there’s an audible difference, maybe not, but I think a competitive environment should be fostered.

iRiver put out a limited OGG firmware update. Would it be so difficult for others to do the same?

Two caveats:
1. I have no idea how difficult it is create said update or the extra costs associated with creating a device capable of receiving updates.

2. I am unsure of the legality/licensing fees associated with putting out say an AAC update.

I’d love to hear from anyone better informed on these issues.