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Palm Pre "iTunes Hack" Detailed By DVD Jon
CNETNate writes "As the reviews of the Palm Pre start to roll in, DVD Jon expands on previous coverage of the Pre showing up in iTunes as some sort of an iPod, by publishing the offending code Palm has used to enabled the feature. As suspected, in regular USB mode, the phone addresses itself as a standard peripheral. But in 'Media Sync' mode, it claims to be an iPod ... from a vendor known as Apple."
Or in other words, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or company has enough marketshare or mindshare to manipulate the market itself.
Just as you say, the "monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and lack of viable substitute goods." part doesn't mean that a company with 50% marketshare, or even 100% marketshare automatically is a monopoly, nor does it mean that other companies being unable to enter the market because of a companies greater consumer mindshare automatically constitutes a monopoly.
For Apple's iPod/iTunes ecosystem to be considered a monopoly they would have to be doing things like offering discounts to vendors for not carrying other portable music players or making music bought from iTunes deliberately unplayable by other portable music players (Not an issue anymore, previously DRM was there due to labels and could be removed by burning and ripping the tracks back and forth to a CD, so maybe you could have made a case for this in the past, but now its not an issue), dictating pricing to the labels (which you may be able to argue that they have done this in the past by restricting prices to 99 cents, but amazon, napster, and all the other music sellers also have their price points set at 99 cents, as well as iTunes have variable pricing now anyways), or possibly by locking iTunes down to only provide syncing functionality to the iPod.
Since Apple has done none of those (yet), I think the internets are making a mountain out of a molehill. That being said, if I were Apple I _would_ lock out the Pre from imitating an iPod/iPhone, *with* the solution being that I make a simple open API for devices to sync with iTunes. Why? Apple prevents the potentially buggy workaround solutions to syncing with iTunes, and if all of the sudden 1 gillion mp3 players/phones come out with iTunes syncing support, iTunes becomes more of a standard for music/contact/calendar etc synchronization than it already is because of iPods, and its install base grows larger than it already is. Consumers can still then buy their music from other players, but given the chance to have the all in one solution of buying and syncing all your media and information from one source most people (or at least the non-technical masses) would probably stick with the integrated solution of the iTunes store. It would end up being a tie for Apple, more people use iTunes and the iTunes store at the expense of the iPod not being the only (sortof) hardware that can sync with iTunes, but for everyone else (the 3rd party vendors and the consumers), its a win/win situation.