Musicmatch, first known for its jukebox player software packaged with many PCs and sound cards, was one of the first online digital download music stores for the Windows Media platform...I'm reasonably certain their online store beat Napster to the punch.  The two services have been largely similar: both offer Windows Media protected format music downloads, at 99c per track or (usually) $9.99 per album.  MSN music joined the fray recently with a similar service, but their store is so terrible and difficult to use that I have to assume they've "thrown the game" on purpose, to let the third party ecosystem of music stores (and broad support for WMA protected format) flourish.

Both Musicmatch and Napster also offer subscriptions that give you unlimited access to a majority of their libraries, with the ability to stream or download the files, but not to burn them or copy them to other PCs or portable devices.  The subscriptions are a terrific way to explore new music.  The Napster subscription is especially good, because they've built a Windows Media Center front-end to the service, so you have access to a huge library of music from your home entertainment center (i.e. your "stereo").  The software is buggy, but it's worth putting up with the bugs because there's so much good music, all available from your remote control.

Recently, Napster upped the ante by offering a $15/month subscription that works just like the aforementioned one (which is only about $10/month) but also allows you unlimited copies of the downloaded files to portable music players.  Not bad.  But the plot thickens.  Yahoo bought Musicmatch a while back, and through that acquisition is now offering Yahoo! Music Unlimited, its own subscription service with unlimited copying to portable players.  Better yet, it's only $4.99/month if you pay for a year's worth of service ($6.99 on a month-to-month basis).

This means Yahoo, arguably the most recognized brand on the Internet (OK, maybe 2nd or 3rd at this point), has standardized on Windows Media and "Plays for Sure" as its platform.  There are now a lot of music services on Microsoft’s platform, and one of them is HUGE.  How many sites use the AAC format in a form compatible with Apple's iPod?  Just one that I know of: iTunes.

Furthermore, Philips and Microsoft have jointly announced the release of a new chip set for portable players that has Windows Media baked right in the silicon.  Strike two for Apple.

Apple's iPod has a huge market share (something like 70%, I believe).  Their hardware looks great, and people love their iPods.  Most Windows Media-based portables look like cheap knock-offs by comparison.  As a fashion item, iPods rule, and until Microsoft understands the fashion component of this market, their success will impeded.

But eventually Microsoft will get this part right, and even if they don't, it may eventually matter less and less.  Sony's Betamax once had a fiercely loyal customer base and had the VCR market to itself.  Then scrappy ol' JVC came out with an inferior format called VHS.  They licensed it to every OEM under the (rising) sun and "VHS" eventually became synonymous with "VCR." The same ubiquity-to-also-ran-status transformation will happen to the iPod.  And for the same reasons.  Call me crazy.  Just remember that you said that when the Windows Media Audio format is so universally adopted that no one will even notice anymore.

On the northeast corner of West 8th Street and 6th Avenue (as in the opening lyrics to the Rolling Stones’ “Dance (Pt. 1)”), for years and years, there was a trusty old-fashioned neighborhood drugstore, complete with a soda counter, called Whelan Drug.  For a long time, Whelan Drug was 8th Street to me.  Eventually, like everything on 8th Street, Whelan went out of business.  Alas, that was to be my first experience with loss of the seemingly permanent.

Anyway, if memory serves, the store stood vacant for quite a while.  And then in came a new tenant.  Whelan was a hard act to follow, but its successor was pretty good: the first outpost of the Upper West Side’s hot dog mecca, Gray’s Papaya (excellent photo here).  I used to take the subway up to 72nd Street to eat those hot dogs, and now I no longer had to.  Yum!

If you’re not from New York, you might know Gray’s anyway as it’s been featured in films and television.  For some reason, the only movie example I can think of is a really silly film with Matthew Perry and Selma Hayek called “Fools Rush In.”  Perry’s character moves to Vegas and Hayek’s sends him a care package with a bunch of Gray’s dogs topped with sauerkraut.  Uh huh, sure; it’s Gray’s, not Katz’s.  The latter traditionally let you “send a salami to your boy in the army” (in New York, that rhymes). But Gray’s doesn’t ship; they don’t even deliver.  HBO’s “Sex and the City,” had a much more accurate portrayal of Gray’s featuring the 8th Street location in an episode where Carrie hits the place for a snack after a late night out.  As usual, Sex and the City got the true NY experience down pat.  I miss that show.  Macho of me, eh?

But I digress.  Gray’s Papaya, as the name would imply, pretends to be famous for its various tropical fruit-derived beverages, but is in fact truly famous for its hot dogs.  It’s also infamous for its awkward diction and grammar, with signs asserting that the hot dogs are “better than filet mignon” and a while back assuring its customers that “not all hot dogs are not all alike.”  In some languages, double-negatives actually have the same meaning as single negatives.  These guys are working hard to get English in that linguistic family.

Anyway, the hot dogs really are terrific.  One reason is that they’re grilled and not boiled (unlike the Sabrette stand variety that we used to call “dirty water dogs”); another is, I think, that the hot dogs are seasoned with paprika and a few other ingredients a little more sophisticated than MSG.  Another reason the place is so good is that it’s quintessentially New York, in the same way the subway is.  That is, people of all economic strata are in there, dining next to each other while standing, sharing the same humongous mustard dispenser, with a couple weeks’ encrusted residue at the end of the spigot.  Get the picture?  It’s not pretty, but it’s real.  I think the grit may be more important than the paprika.

Meanwhile, back uptown, where the world is broken down into West Side and East Side, Papaya King has long been the East Side rival to Gray’s.  They make a good dog too, and they’ve been around since 1932, making them quite a bit older than Gray’s.  And yes, you can check out the history of the place at www.papayaking.com.

The funny part is that the King, in addition to Gray’s, has extended his empire to the Village!  A spanking new Papaya King has opened at the southwest corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue.  I haven’t gone yet, but I will.  And last night, I noticed a new Papaya-come-lately called Papaya Dog, on the corner of W 4th Street and 6th Avenue.  Not sure I’ll patronize such a derivative competitor.

So what’s with all the hot dog places in the Village?  Could it be a response to inflation of the average entrée price in the neighborhood?  Could it be all the newcomers to downtown are trying to make the neighborhood more like what they left behind uptown?

Or could it be history repeating itself?  Way back, in the 1970’s, on 8th Street, about half a block down and across the street from where Gray’s is now, stood Orange Julius.  I know that “Julius” still exists in other cities and towns, but it used to be a New York joint (to me, it's a bit like H&H Bagels leaving town to set up shop in South Bend, Indiana, but again, I digress).  The fact is that 8th Street has hot dogs and fruit drinks in its blood, and a revival of the hot dog tradition in the neighborhood is just fine by me.  One day, maybe Whelan Drug will make a comeback.

A reunion of sorts took place today.  Along with my wife and 7-month old son, I joined two of my high school classmates, their kids and their husbands, at the playground in Peter Cooper Village.  The kids had fun (right now, my son thinks anything with people is fun) and the adults, who have stayed in contact over the years but are not super-close, caught up with each other.

The three of us grew up in Manhattan, and the three of us want to continue living here.  But the truth is that my two classmates cannot stay, nor could I but for my parents and landlords being one and the same.  I feel it reasonable to say that we are all successful, and were able to withstand the real estate inflation of the 80s and early 90s.  We recognize we need to spend more, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, to live in a city that is far cleaner and safer than it was when we grew up here.

But the last four years or so have put Manhattan, and indeed many parts of Brooklyn and Queens, out of reach financially for most people with families.  Between rent or mortgage and maintenance, not to mention schooling, New York has become the increasingly exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy.  The alarmist rhetoric of ten years ago and more has proven uncannily accurate.

Even Peter Cooper Village, where my erstwhile classmates live (and one grew up) and Stuyvesant Town have become expensive.  Originally established as affordable housing for veterans of World War II and forever places known for their long waiting lists (up to 15 years) and low rents, Cooper and Stuy Town have effectively converted into luxury rental developments.  I didn’t even see one of the famously friendly squirrels.

In general, I support free market economics and am not a fan of protectionist policies.  But I know full well that this city’s historical strength has been its sometimes almost overwhelming diversity, both of ethnic and economic strata.  And if New York becomes the exclusive domain of the moneyed class, its very fabric, its core, will disintegrate.

Indulge my perhaps Utopian analysis, but I believe New York has bred an ambitious, high-functioning, successful citizenry precisely because many of its members started with little and lived side-by-side with those who had more.    Many, though certainly not all, of the wealthy in this city have traditionally encouraged and admired those with high ambition and achievement and little monetary means.  That symbiosis has been the story of this city and is what has made it invincible.

Invincible.  Through gang wars, through unimaginable political corruption, through a fiscal crisis in the 1970s that made everyone want to leave and almost destroyed a now century-old subway system.  Invincible.  Through every horrible facet of what happened here when the planes hit the buildings and attacked all of us.  Invincible even through the political dissonance that has followed those attacks.

But perhaps New York will not be invincible in the face of its own success.  A success that makes people want to live here who might once have been afraid even to visit.  A success that brings the city, in fact, to evict its champions, its advocates, its lifeblood.  Surely we are smart enough to reconcile our success with our strength, our attractiveness with its contributors and architects.

Surely we can do better than outright self-betrayal.

AS 2005 is an intensely compelling product.  If I may borrow a concept from OLAP, the Analysis Services product improves on its predecessor in a number of “dimensions,” including ease of use, feature richness, sophistication of client tools, and programmability.  This release truly feels like a serious tool for developers, statisticians, and scientists. It makes AS 2000 look like a bare-bones, proof-of-concept product by comparison.

In preparation for some upcoming presentations (including one at Tech*Ed in a month and a half), I’ve been working especially hard over the last week studying Analysis Services Data Mining and, on the OLAP side, ADO MD.NET programming for both the server and the client.  My general impression while examining all of this technology is that it is rich, elegantly extensible, and much easier to use than its predecessors.  Some highlights follow:

• ADO MD.NET will be familiar to ADO MD and ADO.NET programmers alike.  Do you prefer thinking in terms of axes and cellsets?  It’s all covered.  More comfortable using DataReaders and DataSets?  That’s accommodated too.  Jealous of the CLR programmability on the relational side of SQL Server 2005?  Don’t be: you can now use the objects in the Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdServer namespace in a .NET assembly to create MDX-callable functions that can accept and return sets, tuples, and scalar values, all with the same security model as on the relational SQLCLR side.
• The number of Data Mining Algorithms has been extended significantly and the ability for you to create your own plug-in algorithms is carefully documented, rather than merely being implemented.
• Tools for browsing models have been extended significantly and are available from both Analysis Services Projects in Visual Studio (a.k.a. Business Intelligence Development Studio) and directly from SQL Server Management Studio.  Tools for visual development of prediction queries are also readily available in both tools and are easy to use (in AS 2000, the Prediction Query Wizard is buried in DTS, and viewing prediction query results is rather inconvenient).
• Mining Structures, a new entity in AS 2005 databases, contain a common data source/input column set/predictable column set configuration that can be used by multiple models within the structure.  Each constituent model can be built using a different algorithm, the same algorithm with different parameters, or a combination of both.  Better yet, new “lift” charts allow you to graph the relative accuracy of all your models, both for predictable columns in general and specific values of those columns.  As with other tools, lift charts are available from both Analysis Services projects in Visual Studio and from within SQL Server Management Studio.  Here’s a screenshot of the latter (forgive the large size, but I want you to be able to read all the text within):

I continue to believe that the real story to SQL Server 2005 is its business intelligence feature set, and I don’t just mean Reporting Services and ReportBuilder.  OLAP and Data Mining technologies from Microsoft are powerful and eminently useful analysis tools.  Their potential for adding value to the entire Microsoft stack, from Office to SharePoint, BizTalk to Commerce Server and every member of the Microsoft Business Solutions family, is tremendous.  Continue to ignore these technologies at your own peril. 

Seventh Avenue South (the extension of Seventh Avenue below Eleventh Street) is a funny, crooked street.  It was actually created specifically to provide a “cut and cover” connecting corridor for the West Side IRT subway (today’s 1, 2, 3, and 9 lines) between the southern end of Seventh Avenue and the northern end of Varick Street.  (Some excellent background info is available here.)

When the street was built in 1917, buildings in its way were demolished, or cut right through.  If you look at all carefully, you can see evidence of Seventh Avenue South’s disruption to the buildings around it.  To this day, many buildings that face the street are of odd triangular shapes, and some of them are even “shaved” at their corners.  Since the street proceeds on a diagonal, it intersects with streets that run perpendicular to each other, creating awkward intersections all along its route.  Most businesses that open on Seventh Avenue South don’t stay open for very long, and I attribute this to the street’s challenge to simple navigation by pedestrians.

One notable exception to the perennial business failures on the street is the Village Vanguard, one of Jazz’s most important landmarks, which first opened at its present location in 1935, 18 years after Seventh Avenue South was created.  The basement location and odd triangular shape forced on it by Seventh Avenue South have, for whatever reason, created an atmosphere that seems to nurture Jazz music and the audience’s appreciation of hearing and seeing it performed live.

My wife Lauren took me there for my birthday last week to hear Bill Charlap, a superlative Jazz pianist, and his trio colleagues, Peter and Kenny Washington, on bass and drums respectively (no relation).  The music was great, but hearing it at the Vanguard made it even better.  Looking at photos of Jazz greats adorning the walls (including a great one of Charlap playing mid-note with his ear to the piano) while the music’s playing, and knowing that they all played there, is just a great experience.

The Internet is actually a wonderful way to discover the prominence and continuity that is the Village Vanguard.  Try doing a Google search on “Live at the Village Vanguard” and you’ll see how many Jazz artists have performed and recorded there.  (By the way, Joe Lovano’s “Quartets Live at the Village Vanguard” album is terrific.)  If you click through the search results, you might come across this album cover of “John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard Again!” which was recorded in 1966 (the year I was born):

The clothes may be dated, but I can tell you that the outside of the club looks exactly the same today as it does in that photo.  There’s nothing more exciting than visiting places that persist in this way, as ongoing businesses.  I think it provides the closest possible thing there is to time travel.

If you’ve never been to the Vanguard, you should go (even if you don’t live in New York).  It may have been there for 70 years, but I worry that New York’s real estate market hyperdrive could one day spell the venue’s demise.  Make sure you experience its history before it becomes history, or else hope for a crash in the real estate market.