Geeklawyer has said before that he is a conflicted Apple fanboy. The iPod and OSX-10 are sexy designer kit with great interfaces. OSX is Linux as it should be: full of non-geeky ‘just workingness’. But its hardware is always a tad expensive, significantly and deliberately so: Apple’s profit centre is bolts not bits. And it intends that to remain so. OSX and iTunes are therefore no more than leveraging tools for selling expensive hardware.
By virtue of the great design but also good luck, the competition was rubbish, Apple got total domination of the portable music market. Then like all monopolists it sought to embed its monopoly. Although it supported the open mp3 format it refused to support Microsoft’s WMA format; so there’s not a lot of pointing subscribing to a Microsoft based music store which won’t ship unprotected MP3s because of stupid industry paranoia about copying. And these non-Apple stores aren’t able to ship the protected AAC format because Apple refuses to licence the format to third parties. So your choices are iTunes or the door. Bingo, Market dominance at 60%.
And then the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys get involved. Depending on if and how the legislation is implemented this could sink the bobbling Apple (OK, no more crap Apple puns). It may require Apple France to ship in competing protected formats such as WMA. Obviously this would hole Apple’s monopoly below the waterline. Apple is has reservations about all of this, condemning it as tantamount to state piracy. Cretinous and transparent hyperbole of course. No-one, not even Apple, is suggesting that the law requires the removal of DRM, as though that were a bad thing in any event, but merely the conversion from one protected format to another protected format. Apple’s hysteria is merely the predictable whining of any monopolist seeing their profits endangered.
The more interesting question is whether this will have an effect on the non-French market. Some have said that Apple will merely withdraw from France. And that would be an eminently prudent move on their part. But would it do them any good? Depending on how the law is formulated maybe not. While Apple may withdraw from France it may be that Microsoft Real, et. al., would be able to lawfully reverse engineer the format so as to supply AAC format to its subscribers. This need not be limited to French users: any global user of a Microsoft only format MP3 machine could be directed to a French site if they wanted to use a previously iTunes only tune. An American Microsoft user could now buy a non-Apple MP3 player and get Britney Spears whereas they couldn’t have done before. So why buy an iPod? Why not get a Creative or iRiver player?
That is Apple’s fear: it’s premium priced hardware is now in danger. Expect some very serious lobbying and extremely large contributions to French MPs election funds right about, ooh - now!
On a side note Geeklawyer lost his iRiver iHP-140 MP3 player which dropped from an Austrian ski-lift. But he cannot find a compelling proposition for a new MP3 player which must be Harddisk of > 20Gigs with inbuilt mike, FM radio, pictures &, ideally but dispensibly, text file display. IPod are expensive bollocks for all the aforementioned reasons but non of the current offerings from other manufacturers seem to have entirely glorious reviews. He’s leaning towards the Creative Zen Vision: M. Has anyone got any opinions?
On a totally unrelated point, congrats to Geeklawyer, who is mentioned in the Times today…. fame awaits! (Although one thinks it may take a while coming)
I’d already spotted this but thanks for the headsup. In fact they screwed up: http://geeklawyer.org/blog/2006/03/28/the-thunderer-farts/.