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Jobs' Invitation To Microsoft a Trap?
An anonymous reader writes "Chris Seibold over at Apple Matters, has written up an interesting analysis on Steve Jobs' suggestion that Microsoft make their own mp3 player. He argues that it is more bait than business plan, a deft move by Steve Jobs to lure Microsoft into a can't-win war. The key, according to the article, is the licensing of FairPlay." From the article: "The folks who stick with Microsoft get to fight over, roughly, twenty percent of the market. The folks that go with Apple would be aligning themselves with what has become the industry standard. The players that license FairPlay would have access to the iTunes store, backwards compatibility with the songs consumers have already purchased, and a chance to compete on a perfectly level playing field with the iPod. It doesn't take a Stanford MBA to deduce that the potential rewards of opting to use FairPlay far outstrip the rewards of going with PlaysForSure."
In the immortal words of Bruce Cambell (Ash):
Its a trick. Get an Axe!
More
Admiral Ackbar: It's a trap!!!!
Good karma sticks to me like velcro on a piece of plexiglass.
Move along, citizen.
or a consumer could just stick with their own music sources that require no DRM at all. That's what I'll be doing, no thanks Apple/MS/anyone else.
... a monopoly? Wow. Slashdot actually endorsing monopolies now.
otherwise, how would it BSOD?
http://xkcd.com/313/
From the article:
"Jobs reasons that since iTunes and the iPod use the vertical integration model that Microsoft could use the same tactic to finally relegate the iPod to the technical trash bin. In theory, the system would work as follows: Microsoft would bundle a music playing program with every PC that, of course, pointed to an iTunes like music store. The model would be completed when people buy a Microsoft produced digital audio player. Consumers, being the lazy slugs they are, would take the path of least resistance. Inevitably, iPod marginalization would ensue."
Did Microsoft get in trouble for this sort of anti-competitive bundling before? If so, are they really stupid enough to try it again on such a large scale?
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
M$ should continue to focus on software. Maybe an itunes-killer; let everyone else worry about an ipod-killer. There is still money in selling music.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
For some reason, FairPlay and PlaysForSure both remind me of products in dystopian science fiction novels by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson...
I guess that the truth is stranger than fiction.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does Apple even have any plans on licensing FairPlay, or is this another blogger speculating about the mighty Apple?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
"[Jobs] reasons that since iTunes and the iPod ..."
Just for the sake of accuracy ...
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
This looks more like Apple leveraging on their near monopoly on digital audio players in order to bring their competitors down on their knees.
You know... like Microsoft leveraging on their near monopoly to force down your throat Internet Explorer, MSN, Media Player, Anti-vírus, personal accounting, etc...
Even though it's a sweet irony, it's just as bad. By the way, I know very few in Portugal who have an iPod versus other brands, is this monopoly only in the USA?
Uh oh, the chairs will be flying at Microsoft over this..
Whatever happened to the days of throwing a hammer at big blue (the "80%" market share at the time) or "thinking different"? Seems that Jobs is quick to flip when he finds himself in a position of power instead of the small-time player (pun not intended).
To the consumer, the underlying problem is still there. Whether it's iDRM or M$DRM, I still have to jump through hoops to get anything approaching fair use out of the music I buy.
Give a man a beer and he wastes an hour. Teach a man to brew and he wastes a lifetime.
but wouldn't Ballmer doing gorilla dance while stomping on iPod make him a 'Microsoft iPod killer'?
Be vewy vewy quiet... I'm hunting Micwosowfts!
But would Jobs really expect to trick MS into the losing battle of creating their own MP3 player? Of course not! He's secretly hinting that they...erm... buy the other companies making them!
That would sound a little bit more like the MS I know and love.
Mark my words... if your favorite MP3 player is one other than the iPod, and MS buys the company, I told you so!
You mean like how developer developers are better off targeting the dominant platform to maximize the return on their development effort by creating software for the largest audience possible with the least work possible?
Call me crazy, but I read a bunch of false assumptions into the summary.
1. "make their own player" e.g. hardware
No, they wouldn't make their own. They would license an OEM product at relatively little cost to Microsoft. The DRM/WMP (big-money investment) is done, the actual "player" is commodity hardware. Connecting it to WMP can't be so much work.
2. "make their own player" e.g. market strategy
I don't follow it so closely but I imagine there are quite a few Microsoft MP3 DRM licensees. That doesn't stop Microsoft from actually marketing a player, but I have a feeling they are trying to out-commoditize Apple. Commoditizing is what Microsoft knows how to do.
3. Apple's "Fair Play"
Is it available to anyone who wants to make an mp3 player? Last time I checked HP got the whole package from Apple. Apple's style tends to include everything, not just the DRM part. Different platforms is definitely a different case (cell phones) but for an "mp3 player" I doubt Apple is dying to play the compete against fellow licensees who offer their device at a lower price game. It's *never* worked for them.
I'm sure Microsoft will try to compete more effectively with Apple, as someone with some OEM experience, I don't see it happening quite the way the article tries to make it seem.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Eerybody will have an mp3 player built into their cell phone in a dfew years and nobody will need an iPod. So unless Apple starts getting into the cell phone business they will lose to Motorola, Nokia, etc.
Vote for Pedro
It reminds me of the movie The Princess Bride...
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
20% of the MUSIC BUYING market? I highly doubt that PlaysForSure is 20% of the music market. I hardly belive that iTunes even makes a 20% dent in the music buying market.
The facts are that iTunes might be 80% of the online market but it doesn't matter. That is a tiny segment of the market. Most people who are buying MP3 players are ripping music from their new CD's, their old CD's, and their friend's CD's. Backwards compatible doesn't mean crap with apple. They break it every other year anyway. So will MS's DRM.
The market doesn't have any clear winner YET for a DRM for music. Until it does it is pretty lame of anybody to say that FairPlay is the standard (it isn't. not even close)
As of today, the standard and vast majority of music which is being played on mp3 players (including ipods) are DRM free ripped music from CD's. Period.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
One of the things that most people don't understand is that there are many times that when you sell more, your profits go down.
To explain it in economics terms: demand for a product rises as the price falls. So, if you lower the price, you will sell more units. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit. Let's say that you can sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit. It is better to sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit ($500,000) than 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit ($100,000). Of course, the reverse can happen. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units for $100 profit per unit ($100,000) or 1,500 units for $50 profit per unit ($75,000). Selling those additional units looses you money. It is desireable for the business to produce and sell fewer units.
So, if Apple allows other devices to be more iPod-like and therefore gets revenue from more unit sales (both iPod and FairPlay units), it wouldn't necesserally increase their profits since they might have to lower the price of the iPod or loose iPod sales to sales of FairPlay devices which people are more likely to substitute and give Apple lower profit.
It might be good for Apple. It might not. Only a very through economic analysis of Apple and the market (as well as a ton of speculation) could tell us whether it is actually a good move. Being biggest doesn't mean being most profitable.
Lets all sing together... "Apple is in the Hardware Business"
Microsoft would never come up with such a catchy name, they'd call it something stupid and bland like MS Portable Audio
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
I call Bullshit.
How is anything an industry standard when only one company sells it? Even Motorola has dropped it from their ROKR phones. Something becomes an industry standard when an entire industry adopts it, and not just because the largest current player in that market uses it.
Even the claim in this article that MS should make their own MP3 player is bogus. By definition an MP3 player doesn't user FairPlay. It plays MP3 files. A FairPlay player uses FairPlay.
This is just badly written all around.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It seems to me that the name PlaysForSure is an attempt to apply the old Windows monopolist playbook to a field where they don't have a monopoly. To say that a song 'plays for sure' on a particular box is to say everyone has this kind of box, so you know the software to play the song is there.
;-)
Unfortunately for Microsoft, everyone does *not* have this kind of box, and PlaysForSure files won't play on the boxes most people have. It's a complete sham.
We're not talking about playing WMA's on your desktop computer any more. Everyone that has an iPod has AAC support on their iPod and their desktop machine. In fact PlaysForSure files won't play on an iPod, and won't play on a PlaysForSure player owner's Macintosh if they happen to have one.
None of this is to say that Microsoft's market share isn't large enough to lure away some users that don't even want to have to load iTunes on their desktops - though the OEM's have started installing iTunes, so that approach may not work either. Still, iPods can't talk to Outlook or display Word docs, so someday if the PocketPC model wins out as the portable device of choice, then Apple's in trouble. MS's monopoly magic would then take over.
The only *real* lock-in Apple has is all the FairPlay songs that iPodders have paid to download. That's a pretty big incentive for an iPod owner to make their next mp3 player an iPod too - if they've been paying for iTunes downloads. So whoever mentioned MS converting FairPlay songs may have a point. Good thing there's the DMCA
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
MS won't make a Windows-Pod yet because it's too soon. They like to stay behind the times.
Can I bum a sig?
When you use iTunes software to rip your CD collection to MP3 or M4A for use with your iPod player, the ripped files do not have any form of digital restrictions management. It's extremely common in the United States and Canada for somebody to own 28 hours worth of CDs, which is enough to fill a 2 GB player at 160 kbps.
i don't think the iPod would exist if somebody else made a half decent music player that integrated well with the Mac OS. there were (and are) other brands that support drag and drop on the Mac OS, but none seemed to really work as cleanly. same can be said for the iPod's interface. the iPod was far from the first MP3 player, but they simplified it, and more importantly, let Mac users play along. remember the iPod was a hit before the MS Windows support was anywhere near what it is today.
the same thinking could possibly also say:
iTMS would not exist if the other music stores were iPod friendly, and had relatively lenient DRM (like Apple was eventually able to wrangle). iTMS was not created to be a huge financial hit, it HAD to exist because Apple could not let their iPods have no access to legal digital music sales. Apple never intended it to make much money, and flat out said so in their quarterly earnings reports and in interviews.
1. Burn an Audio disk.
2. Convert disk to MP3.
3. There is no three. Your done.
That's Apple DRM. OK, good for them for building something that looks like DRM so they could drag the dinosaurs in the music industry kicking and screaming into the digital age. I'm sure there were a lot of meetings where the presence of Fair Play was vital to not getting tossed out on the street in front of a moving bus. But do we really have to pretend along with them that they have a real DRM? If you have ever given Apple DRM a minute of worry, you should ask for that minute back.
San Francisco Photographers
Seriously, the iTMS has served me ONE function only - to search for music I like and to preview 30 second clips for me to decide whether or not I want to buy the CD at BestBuy for $12.99.
I admit, I am a diehard Macintosh, pro-PowerPC/anti-Intel archtecture zealot who downloads the FREE iTunes Music Store download of the week, but I will NEVER EVER purchase music online. First, with DRM, you never really own the music, wipe the license from your hard drive and you'll see what I mean - you can't play your music any/everywhere you want. Second, the quality of Apple's online downloads is pretty bad, for a audiophile. C'mon, 128-bit ACC/MP4 is what? Like no comparison to AIFF or the '--alt-preset insane' setting in 'iTunes LAME' plug-in, LAME for iTunes. With the '--alt-preset insane' setting in 'iTunes LAME' I can make the best-sounding MP3's available, and for listening through little tiny earbuds on my 4th generation 40 GB iPod, that's good enough. Forget Napster, LimeWire, and other P2P clients, hell, when and if I need to, I'll just loan-out to/borrow from a friend/associate a portable FireWire hard drive for copying an entire MP3 library - non DRM'd music to mine and determine what I want, the rest gets deleted; MB/GB are still expensive you know. Seriously though, iTMS is great for locating music that I want to PURCHASE, and preferentially, I'd like to purchase a CD at low cost from BestBuy or somewhere else which allows me to import into MP3 format in iTunes for portability. DRM is just too messy and inconvenient. The music industry should have had an online index of ALL available music a decade ago when music was being swapped P2P via Napster/LimeWire. Now the RIAA is at the mercy of Apple (at least it's NOT Micro$soft and the rest of the remaining BORG collective).
And, like a recent article I read on Slashdot, I do try to purchase and support the ARTISTS (not the RIAA) for the music written and appreciated.
... The folks who stick with Microsoft get to fight over, roughly, twenty percent of the market. The folks that go with Apple would be aligning themselves with what has become the industry standard. The players that license FairPlay would have access to the iTunes store, backwards compatibility with the songs consumers have already purchased, and a chance to compete on a perfectly level playing field with the iPod. It doesn't take a Stanford MBA to deduce that the potential rewards of opting to use FairPlay far outstrip the rewards of going with PlaysForSure ...
... Apple enjoyed a hardware lead and an application software lead when they mocked IBM's entry into the personal computer maketplace. Apple's computer lead then, and their digital audio lean now, may be more similar than many people around here realize. Basically, digital audio is only in it's infancy, as personal computer ownership was in the early 80s. As personal computer ownership became "mainstream" Apple became marginalized. The same could happen with digital audio, the bulk of the population is still not committed to any player/format. Microsoft could, I'm not saying will - only could, be the choice for the bulk of the population for a variety of reasons. One of which is that it is not going to be portable players that decide the digital music issue, it is going to be car stereos, home stereos, etc. Whoever get's their digital media appliance in the living room is probably going to be the ultimate winner. It might be Apple, it might be Microsoft, it will be years before the issue is really decided.
I own an iPod, I'd be perfectly happy to see Apple win. But declaring the issue already decided, that's just Apple's spin, and the wishful thinking of fans. This could turn out like Apple's mocking welcome of IBM to the personal computer business in the early 1980s.
Apple is not "really" the industry leader for digital audio in any real sense, only in a transitory early adopter phase sense. Calm down, hang on for a few lines
iPod's popularity may be transitory, we don't know how many owners are truly locked in by a large library of DRM'd iTunes Music Store (iTMS) purchases. Whatever people rip themselves with iTunes is not DRM'd and my understanding is that the vast bulk of digital audio is ripped, not from iTMS. Even if a person has DRM'd files that are not portable, the fact that they paid for the music lowers the barrier to their getting replacement files via file sharing, they are not really "stealing" in their own minds, they already "own" the song. It's much like people who in the napster days felt OK downloading a song they owned on vinyl or cassette rather than CD.
to OWN their own tunes.
If Apple and the iTMS die tomorrow the iPods will still play and there are plenty of other sources for MP3s.
With Microsoft's approach, if you're late with the credit card payment, there's just wind blowing between in your ears.
While that approach might work for someone who just plays elevator music, in elevators, it truely bites the big one for any music fans.
Gates doesn't understand the first thing about what Apple has done and why its meshed in so well with Joe Sixpack, his wife, his sons and daughters, and what they want from a portable music player.
He'd probably try to shove Windows in it and tell them they should WANT to edit a Word document.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
No, it doesn't. It's strange that you would think that. I imagine you have not used the software for many years?
The "DRM by default" option (a configured checkbox that was on by default in WMP7 - released five years ago) was changed as of the next release 8 months later (four years ago).
My experience with integrated devices is this: If putting an MP3 player in your cellphone works for you, you can save money by just getting an MP3 player, because you sure as hell aren't making any calls on the cellphone.
It's the batteries, stupid.
Cellphones already push the limits of battery life as it is. Add a music player that drains the battery continuously while it's in use, and you end up with a cellphone that's dead when you need to use it.
Been there, done that, got the spare battery that's ALSO dead because I forgot which one was charged...