But of course I must create a check list of pros and cons to see if I’m gonna sign up for this thing right away:

• Price: a very good deal. It’s significantly cheaper than Netflix and Hulu Plus which is personally running around $20 a month for both services. For perspective, $24.99 is the price of those two CDs which I *ahem* never bought in the first place (well, more than two but I am loathe to estimate how much music in our library came from uh… borrowed CDs). And lastly, I am a MobileMe member who paid $99 annually for not much of anything. So what with iCloud being free and this Music Match thing — I got enough left over for an iPod Shuffle.
• Better quality: appealing to clean up the handful of borrowed CDs containing pops and clicks, but I’m unsure sure the quality increase will be noticeable, as most often the music is piped through ear buds.
• Ease of use: based on this TNW article, it sounds like Apple got this right. Meaning, you want to play a song on your iPhone and it “just works.” Which is a big deal for the relatively-tech-addled spouse and her Verizon iPhone — I don’t want to be tech support for each play of Enya. She and Him maybe, but not Enya.
• Value: to be perfectly honest, the cloud sync of our music library doesn’t feel like a must have, and Apple is partly to blame — I don’t think having “all my music” everywhere is necessary. Years ago, I swore by a classic iPod that held everything, but then came the iPhone with its relatively paltry storage, forcing me to pick and choose what albums to sync. And so my listening habits changed. Instead of listening to thousands of tracks on shuffle, I now listen to maybe three or four albums repeatedly — like in the pre-iPod days — and I kinda like it that way.
• The future: I really hope iTunes Match expands to video. TV shows and movies. Larger files take up more local space and are tedious to download and sync; I’d love to shove ‘em all in the cloud and stream.

So ultimately, I’m signing up for iTunes Match, with the selling points being the price, ease of use, and a hope for the future — I have a feeling one route to my long dreamed-of desire for on demand video involves iTunes Match and iCloud. That last bit may not happen, but $24.99 is an inconsequential amount of money to find out.

My thoughts about Google’s OS-less, browser-only laptop haven’t changed since my original post on the subject — I just don’t get why anybody would want a device that does even less than a comparably priced laptop on which a browser is just one app among many. And this opinion applies is equal-opporunity: I’d laugh along with the rest of humanity if Apple released a MacBook Air that only ran Safari. But they would never do such a thing.

The current Google ChromeBook just seems like a bragging-rights device for head-in-the-clouds (pun intended) early adopters to haughtily announce in a Bill-Gates-squeaky-voice “I do everything in a browser.” But Apple has shown time and time again that you can’t succeed in the market with a device geared solely for such early adopters.

I reiterate my expectation that at some point in the not too distant future, the Google ChromeBook will be replaced by a laptop running Android. That would mean it could run Google TV. Hey, that just might be a hit. Maybe.

Like many other companies built in Silicon Valley, Netflix prides itself on its analytical, data-driven approach to making decisions. But it made a classic business misstep. In its reliance on data and long-term strategy, the company underestimated the unquantifiable emotions of subscribers who still want those little red envelopes, even if they forget to ever watch the DVDs inside.

And:

What the company seemed not to respect was the premium that consumers place on having options — even if they don’t actually take advantage of all those options. Just ask any all-you-can-eat buffet operator, or a gym owner who sells six-month memberships.

Basically, even if the data showed that DVD of The King’s Speech was sitting on the desk for months, didn’t mean people wanted it taken from them. We want (and will even pay for) the privilege of exercising certain options in impractical and even silly ways that aren’t apparent from the data alone. And making business decisions based on data alone can be risky stuff — ultimately, the customer is still right. In addition to content being king.