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Is Piracy the Pathway to Apple Profit?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple Matters Chris Seibold writes an interesting piece hypothesizing that Apple's strategy may bank on people pirating OS X for their Intel boxes."
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And then if people want more where that little bait came from, why, they'll just have to switch :D
...we might be using Machintoshes as PCs now. So, why not? It's never too late to start... but how long will it take before we get 50% Apple and 50% Windows market share?
This would only increase the chance that User X and Y complain about Widget Z not working correctly like you see on Wintel boxes. That would be a slow but sure path of tarnishing their brand.
Worked for MS :)
This may be more true than you think. Back in the days of Win3.1, there were rumors flying about of revealing Microsoft memos. According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever. The memos also detailed that Win3.1 never would have reached its current level of popularity without rampant piracy.
I don't have any sources to back this one up, so take it with a grain of salt. But if true, it means that Microsoft recognized that they never would have made their fortune without pirates. A bit odd, no?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html
Key quote:
Even if there were any seeders, has anyone verified that it actually is what it says it is?
First of all, I remember reading that OSX will only work on the Apple computers, and while a crack may exist, one would have to wonder how long it will be until such a fix would be mostly bug free.
The other problem with that idea is that people are going to have to download new programs because being an intel computer of any type doesn't allow you to install the same software on Windows as you do on Unix. OSX is a BSD Unix system after all. This may not be a very good toy unless people are downloading it to make a complete switch pending any advancement in cross-platform software.
Lastly, how many people can you think of running pirated WindozeXP that were so impressed with the product that they bought it? It may work for CDs in a good number of cases, but I can't see that happening as much as this article hopes on an OS level. It may help to increase publicity, which will garner some increase in sales, but nothing like the fame achieved by The Grey Album.
If it works out for Apple in the end, then kudos, but with increased DRM practices and the great deal of elitism among the diehard mac fans, one would have to wonder about the possibility of two camps of mac fans if the piracy worked. Imageine authentic vs. underground fans disputing like Linux vs. BSD users sometimes do...
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
I bet the special component will be the BIOS chip. There will probably be others too. But if Macs use a special bios chip that would pretty much require you to buy a Mac just to get the chip. Does this make sense?
Apple also stated two other things. First, you will not be able to run OS X on a vanilla x86-based computer. Second, there will be nothing preventing Windows from running on the Apple computers and, it was stated, this is expected.
None of that means someone won't hack OS X into working on non-Apple machines. But everyone should be absolutely clear that Apple is moving to the x86 CPU architecture. Period. No Intel PPC. No Intel "Next Big Thing".
As for "stock hardware", most components in Macs now are the same components you find in x86-based PCs. The big difference is the architecture around the CPU. Interface cards use AGP/PCI bus. Memory is DIMM. Hard drive / DVD / CD is EIDE/SATA. I know I can buy off-the-shelf stuff to upgrade or replace many of the components in my iMac G5. Videocard manufacturers are still playing their games, though, by selling the same cards with different BIOS so they can charge a premium.
All they have to do is make motherboards with both BIOS and OF chips in them. If your motherboard doesn't have both sets (you can only buy a motherboard that has both from Apple at least initially) trying to startup OSX will simply fail because it can't find OF. Hacking OSX to work would require at the minimum reflashing your EEPROMs and in the worst case, depending on how the hardware is designed, redesigning your motherboard completely (so you have to buy a new motherboard).
Apple saves a ton of money by not having to support propriatary hardware. Their staff is trained on just a few types of hardward in a small number of configurations. Besides I don't think Jobs has ever wanted to have the biggest market share. He wouldn't mind it. But if he's gonna get it he'll get it his way. He's not going to change Apple's business model just to get market share. He is proud of the respect that Apple has earned and his geek nature loves putting out fancy innovative hardware products. He could care less about Apple dominating the world. Apple is Jobs' own little adventure. As long as he's having fun he's happy. He wouldn't enjoy running a software company so that's why Apple won't be primarily a software company (at least while Jobs is there).
The author's head is so far up his ass he can't see that he's being overly idealistic. I highly doubt most software pirates ever "try" the product and then buy it. Perhaps the honest few, but beyond that, I would wager a bet that nary a user shells out the scrilla once they've pirated a product. People are cheap, they will not buy what they can get for free unless adequately motivated to (i.e. Law suits, a la RIAA).
Say what? People will buy a Mac box instead of running it on a Wal-Mart box to avoid compatibility breaks with OS updates? Has this person never met a determined satellite pirate?
I wholeheartedly agree. They know you probably weren't gonna buy that tune you downloaded anyway. They know that tune might turn you on and get you to buy the artist's CDs (or not).
They also know that if it's that easy for consumers to get music directly, they become redundant. Their tactics are intended to retain control of the artists.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
No, your statement was not a flame. There are several "incidents" that have helped to solidify Microsoft's dominanace, and piracy can most certainly be attributed to that.
The aformentioned incident about Windows 3.1 is most certainly valid. Look at how many people pirated numerous versions of Windows since the early 1990s. This allowed people to become familiar with the operating system. Then, when it came time for people to purchase a new system, what operating system do you think they would have gotten with it (assuming that they had a choice)? Some operating system that was unknown to the general populous, like OS/2, or something that they already knew well because they had been using a pirated version? Since the operating system came with the PC, Microsoft got a fee for that PC sale. So, whereas MS didn't profit from the initial piracy, they still made a sale later on and further addicted the user to Windows.
I still firmly believe that the "crack" for the Kinko's version of MS Office several years ago was planned. For those who don't know or don't remember, U.S. printing franchise Kinko's had a "special" 30-day, full-usage CD for MS Office (I forget the specific version) for something like $5. Shortly thereafter a crack was released that broke the 30-day protection. The change was a simple modification to a DLL file and a huge nuber of these discs were sold. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a lot of concern for the "protection" of the "demo" software, Microsoft would (or should) have made it more difficult than a DLL file for protection. I also heard nothing afterwards about prosecuting the one who released the crack. So, for a few bucks per cracked disc, Microsoft snared how many hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people into Microsoft Office. I'd just about guarantee that the vast majority of those people are still using a version of MS Office. Whether those versions are pirated or not is another matter, but I'll bet that many of them are not.
I really would like to know how much of Microsoft's current dominance is due to past piracy. I'll bet that Microsoft would not be anywhere close to where it is now if there was no such thing as software piracy.
And how many of us have pirated a number of games that we otherwise would not have bought but were so impressive that we purchased what was downloaded and/or purchased any of its sequels or expansion packs? I would think many of us.
I honestly think that there can be an argument made that piracy can under certain circumstances make a product more popular, and Microsoft's dominance is certainly what should be offered as proof of that. I would be willing to bet that Apple would be in the same situation. I know a number of people that I work with (myself included) who would love to work with OS X but are not willing to purchase an additional piece of hardware that we might not be interested in afterwards. But we'd be glad to try it out on one of my Athlon XP/64 systems.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Jobs has always been a hardware guy. He sees the value in tight integration and limited configurations. I'd say a lot of the trouble M$ is in with Windows is the fact that there's too much hardware out there. It has to somehow support everything.
Granted, M$ has billions more than Apple, but in the arena of public opinion, Apple is much 'cooler' than M$ because of design. Plus, Apple can also tout that it just works. Something M$ cannot. Apple stands on the shoulders of others like BSD, Apache, Samba, Java - stuff that other people have already figured out and therefore, Apple does not have to reinvent. And some things like BSD have a lot of security time logged, so Apple doesn't have to deal with these issues. M$ is just the opposite - for a recent example of this see the Acrylic image app.
Sure, Apple, like any company, is all about profit. But at the same time, because of Jobs, they have a mission: to make things that don't suck and to really innovate instead of paying it lip service and patch security holes. So for Apple to make (quite) a few billion dollars less and have a better user experience is worth much more to them.
I know this sounds cliche, but if you've ever used a Mac for some time you would know what I'm talking about. When I plug in a new mouse or whatever, there's no windows popping up nagging me to do something and I surely don't have to compile any drivers myself. So to me, even from a programmers point of view, it just works. Why mess with that just for more market share and added complexity?
Wow... Lots of bad mods today. But I totally agree. Back in "the day" (early-mid 90's), I tried out lots and lots and lots of pirated software. Today, I own copies of the best in every category that I currently use (my favorite small app that I bought because of seeing & using a pirated copy, is Textpad). All the rest that I played with that I didn't like ended up getting nuked. On top of that, in my days of being a developer, I ended up having my employers buy *lots and lots* of copies of various apps that I tried pirated copies of that I couldn't afford myself (like TOAD and more recently, XMLSpy). Take what I did and multiply that by millions of geeks and you have millions (or billions) of dollars of software sold, that wouldn't otherwise be sold (because I would have had no way to try them to see if they were worth using), because of piracy.
I don't respond to AC's.
A lot of code that we think of as OSX lives in things like Aqua, above the kernel level.
Exactly, above the kernel level... where it is already abstracted from the hardware.
that the Bittorrent leak of OS X PPC was entirely bogus, so the whole premise of the article is off.
People mention that Microsoft "allowed" people to pirate Windows for years to increase marketshare and increase sales. It's true that having more systems out there running Windows means more potential marketshare for other apps like Office. However, if someone pirates Windows, why would they not pirate Office, too? So I just don't buy that MS ever encouraged people to pirate Windows.
As you point out, though, Apple has nothing to gain from pirated versions of OS X. If you pirated Tiger, chances are good that you'll pirate succeeding versions of the OS, as well. So, even if Apple did come out with a shrink-wrapped version of OS X for any x86 system, where's the profit potential? It's not there.
Keep in mind, too, that hacked versions of OS X will do more harm than good. Video drivers will be messed up, sound drivers, network cards will not work, and a slew of other problems that Apple never addressed because they didn't intend OS X to run on your particular setup. So, in the end, people who hack OS X will have a lot of frustration with all of the kernel panics and non-working hardware. Is that the experience that Apple wants people to have with their product? Hell no. This is the company that is so anal about the presentation of their product that they even design the user experience just opening the friggen cardboard box!
I don't see why Apple would leak the software on purpose like some claim. They could also give the first version of osx86 away for free, and gain a lot of support and media attention for that move, instead of the "oh, look, it's leaked on the Internet"-approach.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
"The real question is, how long after MS develops office for OS-X 86 will it take for the unmodified code to run in Linux or BSD?"
Office for OSX uses the Aqua interface, so it's not strictly a *nix app. Otherwise, it would have been able to run on PPC variants of Linux a while ago.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Let's assume for a minute that Apple does decide to lock down OSX86, and upon it's release the hackers jump in start trying to make it runnable on generic PCs. Why does everyone automatically that this hack would be easy to implement? Take for example the example of the XBOX. Architecturally speaking, the design of an XBOX is quite similar to that of a standard PC, yet after more than three years of intense development, no commercial version of windows has EVER run natively on the XBOX. Sure, you can run Windows 98 on an XBOX, but not without an emulator like BOCHS. If the XBOX hacking community cannot get windows to run on a X86 based XBOX architecture (which, I may add is based on 20+ years of well known design), how in the heck can we expect a hack to run on software that has been designed for a brand new, never before seen apple-X86 architecture?
"Funny, I was going to say it worked for Adobe..." ... and Discreet, and Newtek..
Not sure I can say the same for games, but when an app is something you can make a living off of, 'piracy' does have a way of making it necessity.
3D Apps in particular have an interesting attitude these days. It is easy to spend between $1,500 and $5,000 for a 3D app. Them's expensive. It wasn't all that long ago that a $500 version of XSI/Softimage came along. We're not talking watered down here, you could actually do stuff with it. Before that was Maya PLD. It's watermarked to hell, but otherwise it's got enough features to be worth downloading and learning from.
I honestly don't think these would be around if not for piracy. At least some companies understand the value of giving something a worthwhile long-term test drive.
"Derp de derp."
However, if you sell demos that happen to get cracked and this drives out the competition then its all legal and you can't get sued in a trust case.
Exactly. That gives the perfect alibi. "No, no, we expected people to use it and buy it afterwards! It's not our fault that hundreds of thousands of people now use our products for $5 and a crack instead of our competitor's $200 version! We are just so very much the real victim here!"
Right.
But think about it. Apple releases their operating system for Intel/AMD. Millions of people pirate it and install it on their own systems. Millions of people now become familiar with OS X for x86 and like what they see. Apple convinces major PC vendors to offer OS X for x86 as an option for new systems. Millions of people purchase their next system with OS X. Licensing fees for Apple; higher demand for Apple software and Apple products.
All hypothetical? Perhaps. But look at history. That's exactly what happened to Microsoft.
Between Windows, Apple OS, and Linux, real competition for the desktop could actually return which should be better for the consumer through genuine innovation (as per the real definition of innovation, not Microsoft's definition) to one-up the competition.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
viral marketing for Apple.
Apple makes hardware boxes, they make their money off their boxes. They don't support every other box out there. They don't have to either.
OS X has "Software Update" (second item on the Apple menu at the top left of the screen or in the system section of the "System Preferences") which calls home once a month (or weekly or daily) at least.
They can get the geshtalt of the box (including the CPU ID) to verify that's its a legitimate request from a box that they have sold (25M to 100M box IDs is almost nothing to store as a DB key) instead of some clone.
If its a clone they can just pop-up the system browser to an Apple page explaining this and inviting them to buy Mac hardware.
This would be a great thing for Apple because it would allow them to preserve the integrity of their company (See we don't encourage ripping us off!) their market share, (clones don't run software update so they need constant re-cloning,) and mindset (buy Apple from the start.)
The idea is not to snuff out the clones (there'll always be some way to clone a computer) but to discourage the practice by encouraging the purchase from Apple option.
Apple has NOTHING to lose this time 'round.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
With Apple moving to x86 pc's, Apple system will no longer be to differentiate from stock x-86 system from Dell, HP, Gateway, etc. Apple can no longer argue that thier systems are more powerful than the comptetition. So, what's going to be selling point? Mac OS X. With it, Apple will be able to highlight the strengths they have ove the Windows OEM. But, Apple will have to get that message to the consumer buying his next PC. Apple store perform that function now by letting consumers play with the system but this not very efficient considering Apple stores are in limited locations. So, they should leverage the internet and allow users play with mac osx on their own desktops.
Apple shouldn't turn a blind eye rampant to piracy. But, they should take a more proactive approach that they largely control. They could release a live DVD or CD of Mac OSX. Something that illustrates the strengths of Mac OS X but leaves it largely useless on an whitebox PC.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Every development build for OS X ends up getting published on p2p networks within days. If Apple was cool with this, they wouldn't have a NDA covering access to development builds, and they wouldn't have sued the guy who obtained developer access via a real developer so that he could give Tiger away.
p g
But the Intel version isn't a DVD - it's only available as part of a $999 "package" that includes a PC mobo in a G5 case, that Apple is demanding back at the end of the year.
It's pretty hard to track a DVD sent to thousands of developers, but if Apple is charging developers $1000 each for access to the Intel hardware, it would be rather trivial to give each copy that goes out a watermark, so that if it gets released, it would be very easy to see who leaked it.
And since developers are in a special agreement to participate in the Intel dev package, Apple could very easily add substantial financial penalties to the contract if their copy got leaked.
Movies have similar watermarks to identify where pirated films are getting copied, but it would be so much easier for Apple to hide a chunk of code in each DVD to identify the very developer involved.
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After Intel based Macs are available, the majority of users will find that modern Macs are not commodity PCs just because they share the Intel processor, and give up trying to install OS X after their PC fails to boot it from BIOS.
Even if Apple made Mac OS X very difficult to install on PC hardware, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to create a virtual machine for PCs that could run it. Such a product could not be commercial, because Apple said they wouldn't allow it.
Somewhat ironically, Apple enterprise tried to sell OpenStep for Intel and OpenStep for Windows for some time in 1997 after first purchasing NeXT, and couldn't find much interest. Of course, at the price they were asking, they are now basically throwing in a Intel Mac for free!
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/images/openstepcd.j
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The few l33t haxxors who get Mac OS X running on a PC will have little effect on Apple's existing market, either in 'loss from piracy' or in 'viral spreading of OS X to create new demand.'
The Mac Mini, iBooks and PowerBooks are all quite popular among those who have bought them, including Linux users who buy them for their hardware features rather than the integration with OS X. All are running proprietary hardware unable to realistically run Windows today. If new versions also allow users access to the only reason wintel PCs need to exist (PC games), buying actual Apple hardware will be even more compelling.
Why buy a Dell system when you can get an Apple Mac that runs OS X for about the same price, and still run your old Windows software in a VM?