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Chris Gorog told a Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York that Microsoft's 'execution has been less than brilliant' over the past year.

'Our business does rely on Microsoft's digital rights management

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software and our business model also relies on Microsoft's ecosystem of device manufacturers,' he said, adding that the software giant has to accommodate a host of service providers and device makers.

'It's a lot more complex to get organised properly than it is to build one device and one service as Apple has done,' he noted. 'It's always been painful at the introduction of new technologies. But it always takes shape like it's done in the past.'

Gorog reiterated that despite its failure to break Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market and a series of worsening financial results, Napster is not for sale. He insisted that the picture will be very different in a year or two's time as the market matures.

'A lot of people ... are really focusing on the tree and are not stepping back and looking at the forest,' he said. 'To date, only five per cent of sales have migrated digitally. We are in the very, very early days of this.'