As both Fake Steve Jobs and the real Steve Jobs charismatically attest, Apple handily dominates the Internet digital media commercial markets of music, mobile players (e.g., iPods, iPhone, etc.) and increasingly audiobooks, music videos, TV shows, movies and other segments. Apple has more market-share than all of its competitors combined. And Apple achieved their enviable position by the book, as Ian Rogers points out, by innovating and marketing better than its competitors.
Well, mostly by the book. Apple latest generation of iPods, for example the iPod classic, are hindered with new cryptography that prohibits syncing your music, podcasts, audiobooks, movies and TV shows to your iPod if you choose to use any software other than Apple’s own iTunes. Ouch.
Fortunately, a work-around has been developed by a clever programmer and released as Free Software so at least for Free Software users there’s respite from the deliberate breakage. But this exception proves a rule.
Apple routinely, electively limits the user utility of its products by imposing proprietary technical architecture that forces a bundling of its products rather than embracing user-benefiting openness towards equivalent and substitutive third-party products. Apple has built an iPod that exclusively works with their desktop media player software iTunes (and in turn iTunes exclusively works with their online service iTunes Music Store.) For comparison, imagine your television’s manufacturer selecting your cable or satellite service. Imagine your bike manufacturer selecting the routes you ride.
I depend upon and adore many Apple personal computer and consumer electronics products (as my extensive collection of Apple Store receipts confirms). But my reasonable expectation and indeed demand as a digital media consumer is interoperability between my choices of competing and substitutive devices, software and services. Give me a Media Web!
More to come. Keep Birdwatching.
Chirps,
Rob
8 Comments
SubscribeFirst:
Why?
Why do companies like Apple or Microsoft always think, it does any good to constrict everything? The only thing, that happens, when one of them trys such things is, that consumers, customers, get very frustrated and tend to go away, or brake the rules.
They inevetably loose marketshare, if they do so.
Second:
Why?
Why do they still try this nonsense road?
Dont they ever learn? The community, that is building in the IT-Market is too strong to supress. They wont let them get supressed. It even became sort of a Sport to decrypt, hack, fiddle and destroy any barrier, ever laid in the way by those Companys. Every try of Copy protection got hacked. The I-Tunes must binding of Ipods? Hacked within a Weekend by our fellow Linux Heroes. They wont be able to build a Fence, high, nor strong enough to supress users forever.
Its foolish!
Conclusion/Plea:
Conglomerates. Dear Sony’s, Microsoft’s, Apple’s and other’s, whom I dont mention, of this World.
Wake up.
It’s our Money you want.
It’s our Fanboyism you want.
It’s us, you need.
Stop making fools out of yourself and let us decide, in which way our bought products work. May it be Soft- or Hardware. Unchain them.
Just for that, I’m not getting a new iPod, and I’m uninstalling the iTunes software I’ve been using for years. I hope a more complete version of Songbird comes out soon to replace it.
@tylerstyle:
Sonys, Microsofts, Apples and the rest will never get it, as long as there are brainless sheep out there who continuously support this mentality by buying their products.
@thomas:
I came to this realization about 4 years ago when I first purchased my 3rd Gen iPod. What took you so long?
You can’t defend a monopoly forever and, inevitably, some time you will lose marketshare. However, until that time has come the monopoly might be almost worthless. Just as Windows is not the platform of the future, your cross-platform Internet Browser is, as wise men have predicted. I’m increasingly ready to believe that.
Some time the platform for music might change from Ipod / Itunes to something different and Apple’s monopoly will be worthless. The most important thing then is that this different way of distributing music must first be implemented in open-source, because if a single company builds the “original”, they will build just another monopoly.
The core community, as you point out, is hard to suppress, but the extended community may not even care about the vendor lock-in they were trapped in as long as it feels good. There’s also something different: Cracking the WMA encryption doesn’t mean to strengthen OGG Vorbis (and therefore open-source). That just means that you are a fanboy.
Yesterday, I was trapped again, this time not by Sony’s Sonicstage, but by Samsung / Microsoft. Not only does the player not play OGG (as advertised), but it is not even recognised as a device on Windows without Media Player 10+, let alone on Linux. Nice player, though.
It’s cynic that you listen your songs about freedom in WMA; your love songs on a player made by rationalists, made probably disobeying human rights; your songs against war on a player fueling civil war in Congo (tantal exploitation). Isn’t it great how we all can overlook that?
Its just to true, what you say. Makes me sad now.
How do you recommend musicians sell their work online? Use SNOCAP to sell music in a universal format? Is there another option?
What about authors? What e-commerce software exists for selling audiobooks or e-books? (Or converting text to audio.)
I’ve been thinking about this for sometime, but the answers still don’t seem clear to me. I realize people will crack any attempts at copy-protection, so copy-protection may be futile as a long-term approach (although it may capture a large swath of the market for an interim period: people who buy iPods). We’re moving into a new age with a wealth of content, both because of the ease of copying and publication? False scarcity has gone away? What does this mean for creators? Sell your work in an unrestricted format to maximize distribution with the awareness that you’re in an ever-more-crowded market?
Anyone have a better idea?
Btw, a panel at >play, a student-run conference I’m part of organizing, will be discussing related topics: http://playconference.org/panels.html#dm
You should email your questions directly to rob at care of this website.
umm…why? isn’t the point of blogging to engage in conversation, open to all?