Slashdot Mirror
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
They got in "trouble," but its quite likely that the benefits of doing this and killing the iPod would far outweigh any consequences.
Uh oh, the chairs will be flying at Microsoft over this..
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.
There is no reason whatsoever to license FairPlay, but the reason for this is not obvious.
The truth is that there cannot be meaningful competition in the field of online RIAA music stores because all the music comes from the same handful of sources. There is no way for the different stores to have a meaningfully different collection or meaningfully different price structure. Apple could license FairPlay as Microsoft licenses PlaysForSure, but that merely obscures the fact that the music industry is still in control of the entire process.
Given a lack of competition in the music industry, Apple opening up the iTMS would not actually create more customer choice; rather, it reduces Apple's leverage on the industry and we can assume that the music industry will keep the extra power for itself. Without control over the iPod, Apple has nothing and the music industry will force everyone toward things like subscription services, whole-album downloads, and probably higher prices.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
DoublePlusUngood...
FairPlay -- you can burn up to 10 CDs containing the files without changing the track setup (but assuming you permute or modify the tracklist you can burn as many as you like); you can authorize up to three different computers to play the track simultaneously; you can copy and backup the files as you like; you own the files...
OK -- that sounds fair to me.
PlaysForSure -- doesn't play AT ALL on the most popular music player on the market.
Now, that sounds Orwellian to me.
You misunderstand the code of the typical slashdotter:
evaluate(){
if(apple)
return good;
else if(microsoft)
return bad;
else if(google)
return good;
else if(DRM)
return bad;
else if(open source)
return good;
else if(monopoly)
return bad;
...
I am trolling
return CowboyNeal;
Favorite quote: "
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."