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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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Worked for MS :) /flame on
"Old man yells at systemd"
How long before my next machine comes with the words "Don't steal operating systems" on the plastic wrap?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Posting AC for no karma whoring.
Apple computer: Is Piracy the Pathway to Profits?
by Chris Seibold
Jun 13, 2005
If you remember the heady days of the first incarnation of Napster chances are you downloaded a song and later discarded the foul bit of pop. Chances are also pretty strong that you downloaded a song and ended up buying the compact disc from your local music store. For me the discarded song was Come on Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. I am sure the music industry chalks that up to a lost CD sale, but honestly, there was no way I was ever going to buy any music by Dexy and his intrepid band of late night dashers. On the other and when I downloaded Devil's Haircut by Beck I went out and actually purchased the entire CD.
The above is a simplification of how piracy can actually move product. Chances are very good that without the illicit download one less copy of Odelay would have been sold. So, for no great investment on his part, Beck sold one more album that he normally would have thanks to being pirated. Software companies have understood this concept for quite some time. They will grudgingly put up with piracy if it sells more copies in the long or if it prevents a competitor from gaining a foothold. Say, for example, someone company produces a legitimate competitor to Adobe Photoshop. The new product feature all of the pixel manipulating goodness of Photoshop but retails for half the price. In basic economic theory the new product would soon displace Photoshop as the image editor of choice. In reality that is not necessarily the case. If Adobe Photoshop gets passed around on P2P sites there is no incentive for theft happy users to try the new competitor, both are stolen and to the end user stolen=free. Years later the one pirate removes the eye patch and becomes burdened with kids and full employment. Suddenly spending hours on the internet looking for registration codes and illegal copies no longer holds the same appeal, it has become easier and safer just to purchase a legitimate copy.
Which brings us to the question of Apple computer and piracy. You, as a reader of fine Apple oriented commentary, are no doubt aware of the recent announcement that Apple is switching to Intel. This has some interesting ramifications, one of the foremost is that you will now, in all probability, be able download a copy of OS X on a P2P site and run it on any plain vanilla Wintel box by employing some sort of hack. To many Apple fans this is a nightmare scenario. "Why" they wonder "would anyone ever buy another Mac if they can run OS X on a Wintel box?"
Before considering why people might still buy Macs even if they could hack a Wintel to do the job let us consider the benefits of OS X piracy. For years interested parties have heard people complain: "Macs are too expensive." At this moment most people are thinking about only of the retail price. This is a mistake, the cost of Macs to a fence sitting switcher encompasses much more than the price tag. To get in the world of Mac you have to be willing to take a massive leap of faith. You must be convinced that a Mac will serve all your computing needs admirably and you probably have to accept that as a truth without extensively using a Macintosh. It is also wise to remember that for most computer users it is an "either/or" decision, not many have the resources necessary to grab a Windows for safety and a Mac just to decide if it a suitable OS. Faced with a decision like that it is not hard to understand why people, time and time again, choose the OS with the greatest amount of familiarity. With rampant piracy suddenly this is not an issue. People can play with OS X on their Wintel box and make an informed decision when they make their next computer purchase. It is not hard to imagine that actually being able to use OS X for a significant period of time might result in more switchers than Apple's ads ever dreamed of producing.
Here one suspects Apple will face a careful balancing act. If hacking a PC to run OS X is triv
Since TFA seems to be down already, I assume it is talking about allowing the release of Tiger for Intel to propogate on BitTorrent networks. Perhaps Apple is allowing for this to give curious Windows users a taste of OS X and it's suite of apps, but this certainly would not continue when the final version is released.
Apple could not easily survive as a software company. Apple has been a hardware company for it's duration. Remember back in 1997, when Apple almost died? Steve Jobs had to kill the clones because Apple could not compete with the cheap hardware. Arguably, Apple is in a much stronger position to sell software due to it's larger user base, better public image, etc., but I don't think Apple would profit as much.
Apple is a hardware company that might be hoping that some users download the torrent, fall in love with OS X, and buy an Intel Mac in a year. Or maybe this whole thing is overzealous speculation on the part of imaginative bloggers. Either way, Apple will remain a hardware company and provide an integrated computing solution that is clean, solid, and attractive.
"Also Apple is at heart a hardware company."
Wrong. From the lips of Steve Jobs himself: "The heart of Apple is OSX."
How can you call Apple a hardware company? Because they put everything in a well designed box? All the components are 3rd party... Apple doesn't make processors, Apple doesn't make memory, Apple doesn't make harddrives or video cards or sound cards. They buy them from hardware companies, put them in a shiny box and then run *their software* on it.
My guess, if I had to put money on it, would be:
- It'll be "legacy free", that is, no PS/2 or serial ports. It will have USB High Speed, IDE, and maybe Firewire, just like their current line up.
- They'll do several single board machines without PCI, similar to the motherboard in a PC laptop in hardware spec.
- The architecture will essentially be that of a PC clone. This'll ensure they can use off-the-shelf components for lower cost machines.
- They'll probably use EFI instead of BIOS.
For reasons why, see the JE linked to in my .sig.
There are a lot of comments that have come out of Apple, together with actual actions, that demonstrate where this is heading. If they wanted to produce a non-standard machine that just happened to have an Intel CPU in it, they wouldn't be making a lot of the decisions they're making. There'd be no reason to abandon Open Firmware. There'd be no reason to change the disk partition format. There'd be comments from Apple to the effect Windows is unlikely to run. What you'll have in a year will be a machine that may well run many industry standard PC operating systems out of the box.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wouldn't trust a .exe ;) .iso or .bin/.cue pair.
If it was real, it would be a
Not to be a stickler but Jobs said that the heart of the MAC (not Apple) is the operating system. That makes more sense too since the ipod makes up such a large chunk of the Apple revenue.
Pathway to Apple Profit?
Apple needs no pathway to profit - it is profitable as a hardware company. They need software only as a selling point for their hardware. Releasing MacOS X compatible with standard non-brand PC's would undermine their hardware sales - and it would be a pathway to ginormous losses like they had in 1997 and 1998, when they allowed cloning. They are profitable since then precisely because Jobs killed clones. Do you seriously believe he did it only to reintroduce Mac cloning ten years later?
Apple is also a company used to having their software run on a pre-determined combination of hardware and software. I suspect these dev kits are no exception. Even if it somehow leaks out, I highly doubt it will work on any 'ol wintel PC simply due to a lack of drivers.
www.lonseidman.com
The original premise was that an x86 release for generic x86 hardware (non Apple firmware) was already released. This however turned out to be a hoax. I doubt Apple is trying to make a revolution giving an OS away.
Without those apps, OS X-x86-Lite would likely suffer the same fate as those who "tried" RedHat only to reinstall their orginal Windows because it wouldn't do anything for them.
This is a boring sig
Although there is a MacOSX developer-version that will run on a particular Macintosh "P.C.," it may not run on your regular vanilla P.C.
But what's worse is that it might run on vanilla P.C., but badly. I can see it now: punks downloading Mac OSX "for free" and having it either crash, or have Quartz disabled, or otherwise run funky. Then the fallout on many a P.C. site/blog will be all about how OSX is crap and can't run well on a Dell.
In short, this could turn out to be bad publicity, if there is such a thing.
From Apple throws the switch, aligns with Intel (June 6):
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
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
And don't download them, you can find them on torrentspy and torrentreactor, the problem is that the >900MB one is a goatse.cx picture weighting 1GB once uncompressed and the other one, >600MB, is stuck at 13% for everyone, plus 600MB for MacOsX is dreaming wide awake, Tiger weights alot so don't expect it to be that small even compressed.
:)
What I mean is that all those article you read about osX being pirated are wishfull thinking, which is then used as a fun opportunity for malware writers.
If you want to create a buzz about osX on x86 this is the worst way, wait till you have actually found a working copy, personnaly found it, not being told about it and then talk about it. Right now those stories are pissing people off because all they get is a wide opened ass or an interminable wait... and I really don't understand how can this help Apple sell more MacOsX or create a buzz before releasing it. If you want this type of marketing to work don't spoil it before it happens because once the good copy is out there people will be very hesitant to get it... and the marketing tactic will fail, and we don't want that
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.
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.
Yes, when a convicted monopolist bundles software as a tactict to further consolidate their hold on an industry, it is called "anticompetitive".
If you aren't a monopoly, you can bundle 'till the cows come home.
I do remember BeOS R5 PE. I installed it on my PowerComputing 150. The problem with their business model wasn't that they gave away a version for free. I think the problem was that there weren't a lot of compelling applications available for BeOS. It was way cool. It did real multitasking-- that was the big 'gee-whiz' for me.
This situation with Apple is different. They've already achieved a critical mass of applications for MacOS X. If people were to install a free version, they'd recognize the credibility of the OS in day-to-day use. BeOS just didn't get over that hurdle.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Now, of course, MACs are quite good, but back in the day their hardware was always screwing up for seemingly random reasons. It made a lot of people curse Apple to the ends of the Earth.
So, if you try this as a company, make sure your product doesn't suck.
Similar to the upcoming US election results