Why would you go to this rather than rebol? Which seems to have the advantage of offering easy to make guis as well. Whereas for a user interface don't you have to go to something like murgalua with Lua? Or are there other short cut gui designer environments for Lua?
Its called linked sales, coercive marketing, whatever. Its trying to force people to buy things they don't want to buy by linking them to things they do. Why should they do it? Because people are smarter than that, and it builds up resentment and bad feeling, and that lowers market share and profitability. Apple should do it because trying to make people who do not want to buy Macs or iPods is bad business. It doesn't actually increase the sales of iPods or Macs. Its stupid.
It is better to have people feel good about you. They will buy more this way than they ever will by being forced.
Same thing about OSX and Apple branded PCs by the way. Its a hiding to nowhere.
The Independent reported the exciting discovery of a viagra like substance in East European heather flowers. Garden Centres across the UK are being besieged by men of all ages.....
You're missing the point. The point is Apple (and MS) are competing with a movement all of whose members have access to all the work and all the progress and can take bits of it as they wish. This is what Ubuntu did with Debian. Its not about what Debian can do, its about what people can do with it. Or what Duval can do with Ubuntu. This is why they don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. This is what is going to be impossible to compete with. Its that Apple or MS are not competing with one company, or several independent ones. They are facing a movement. It really is a different business model.
As for citing Apple propaganda - don't be silly. The link does not prove OSX is open source, because obviously it isn't. Yes, I know it took chunks of BSD in the distant past. So did Windows. Who cares? Its the model we are talking about here.
They both follow the same model, which is to reinvent the wheel every time, and keep the code secret from the competitors. What they should both fear is a competitor who can always start where the last guy left off. This is how science advanced - Newton did not have to invent Euclid from scratch, and this is how Linux has advanced using shared libraries. This is how xorg got started in three months.
This is why they are both following an over costly and obsolete business model, and they will both fall. Apple maybe first, with its locked software and DRM mania. But both will go. Its just when.
Yes, this is the essence of the argument that has to be met. Its hard to see a plausible rebuttal.
It is very different from the iPod market when they entered. Go into any supermarket in the UK and you will find ten or fifteen phones on a rack at various prices from $50 to $200, and with varying contracts, or pay as you go. Everyone who wants a mobile has one - often they have more than one, and they work just fine. Its a different world from the MP3 market as it was when iPod started, and it is not clear that cool and expensive and locked is going to cut it in sufficient volume to justify the entry. And if it does, a month later it will be swamped with cheaper lookalikes.
Those who the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We'll see.
The general consensus seems to be that the iPhone will be a roaring success, and that any suggestion to the contrary is (a) stupid (b) malicious. But nowhere here do we see the argument addressed. The argument was that the phone market is highly competitive on both features and price, and very fast moving, and very different from Apple's other two markets, PCs and iPods. So it is being suggested that Apple will find itself unable to move fast enough, and unable to compete on price.
Whether this is true or not, it will take more than shouts of rage and abuse to refute it, because its a real argument. They do not in fact move very fast in Pods, by the standards of the phone industry. They refresh their PC line very slowly by the standards of the rest of the industry.
The risk reward ratio might favor John D on this one. Long term puts are very cheap right now, and if he turns out to be right, even if there is a low probability of his being right, the stock could easily fall by half. Cheap insurance if you own it, or cheap and good odds speculation if you don't. The issue with markets like this is not predicting them. Its how probable your predictions are, and what will happen if they are right or wrong, and what it costs to lay off your bets.
NOTE: This is not financial advice. This is an effort to make people think statistically about markets and company strategy.
They don't realize that the enemy is not file sharing or people getting their content for free. The real enemy is people buying only the tracks they want, and so lowering the average value of a purchase. The great thing about an LP/CD from a company point of view is that it was a bundle at a high price. This is a key difference between movie downloads and music downloads.
It is very hard to see how they get around this one. Prosecuting people will not take care of the move to singles. They probably cannot raise the price of the singles. It is hard to see how they ever reinstate the album purchase to where it was.
Yes, its tough. And they are not helping themselves by focussing on a completely different problem from the real one.
On a trip to the Far East some years ago, a fairly well informed colleague told me that Seiko had become so concerned about the potential damage to its reputation from badly made counterfeits, that it had started to make the counterfeits itself secretly in the effort to drive the counterfeiters out of the market. No idea if its true, but its a thought provoking line of reasoning.
Yes, sorry, that was a typo. The dude did indeed mean that OSX won't run on 95% of machines made today. He realizes that Vista will run on a very large proportion of them if not all. And people are right to say that it is more like 99% of machines that OSX will not run on.
As to the dude who writes about the one and the many, no, OSX and its hardware are not one, they are two, just like Windows and its hardware are two, not one. Want proof? Have a look at the CD that came with your machine. It probably contains OSX. Or is that a Platonic illusion?
Or Vista for that matter. Its crippled by its limited hardware support. It simply will not run on 95% of the computers manufactured today. Whatever its merits in terms of user features and security, this puts it out of contention for most people in most applications.
People often comment on these threads that there is a problem of people in IT departments and elsewhere being personally hostile to and prejudiced against Macs and Apple. Its true, and it happens because Apple marketing has deliberately denigrated all users of all other products at a personal level, and it puts peoples backs up.
The first thing they will have to do is revamp their marketing, disassociate themselves from the MacZealot tendency, stop positioning themselves as 'cool' and superior. Get away from 'think different' totally.
As long as they engage in culture wars, the other side will respond in kind, and you'll have a lot of people, as now, saying over my dead body to Macs in the corporation.
Oh, and they need to allow OSX to run on third party hardware, as well. Yes, its the same problem.
People fail to understand this kind of thing, its very sad.
The fact is, the only way to design hardware is if you control the software that will run on it. The really important thing is to deliver an integrated experience. This is impossible if you are selling a product like Windows that will run on any old crappy hardware, and explains the superior user experience and stability of the Mac. It is impossible as a phone maker, if you have to allow any old crappy software to run on your phone. And its also impossible if you are a network operator and are obliged to allow any old crappy phone AND crappy software to run on your nice shiny network.
Now at last phone manufacturers and network operators are starting to wake up, and they too will deliver the integrated user experience in the same way, by banning unintegrated software and unintegrated hardware both from running on their platforms. Its the exact mirror image of banning your OS from running on the wrong sort of uncontrolled hardware, and like that, its great news, and we must hope it catches on generally.
Ignorant customers will be the problem.
They seem not to appreciate the benefits of integration, and they keep trying to migrate to clones whenever they have the chance. Well, they are wrong, and they must be stopped. Fact is, repeat after me, "T-Mobile is a network company". It makes its money from calls. This is great for all of us, and especially for T-Mobile, and shows why their strategy has always been like this and must always be like this, and why it was quite wrong to compel ATT back in the mists of time to allow crap phones and switches to be connected to their network, and why Apple is so much better than Microsoft or Linux.
This is called the end-to-end model or sometimes the integrated end user experience. Long may it live and flourish! And not just in Cupertino!
Like all the other stuff that spews out over the net from RD, this should be treated as spam. Don't read it, don't comment on it. And for goodness sake can someone find something constructive for the guy to do with his time? Like programming something very obscure and complicated in machine language?
You already do have these right, for the simple reason which most people don't understand: after you buy something, the supplier will be violating competition law by imposing post sale restrictions on use. They are not enforceable. Whether in Eula, signed contract as you buy or any other form. You cannot impose post sales restrictions on use.
You have also bought it, not licensed it, because licensing requires some kind of continuing financial obligation.
Anyone who disputes this just has to produce either an EC or US case in which (a) a post sale restriction on use has been enforced by the courts, (b) a software sale at retail out of a retail channel has been held to be a license and not a sale.
Was this meant to be an explanation of what exactly caused the Medieval Warm Period? And what caused the Mini Ice Age? And what the contribution of man-made CO2 was in either case? And why the East Antarctic is cooling? And why air temperatures seem to have stabilised? Not to mention what the Wegman report showed about the statistical inadequacies of the Hockey Stick?
Telling everyone to shut up and listen to their betters is not going to make this stuff go away.
The argument is that the strength or weakness of solar radiation leads to cycles in the level of cloud cover, and that this in turn affects reflectivity of the earth, which in turns leads to variations in the rate of absorption from the sun.
Look at it as a variation of the argument that the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. The difference is, they have produced a plausible and experimentally verifiable non-human agency to account for why its concentration (in the form of clouds) may fluctuate cyclically, and they have tied it to previously verifiable fluctuations and coincidental temperature variations in the past.
Its not at all what solar forcing in the models tries to take account of.
There is really no need for accusations about funding and so on. Just answer some simple questions:
1) Why is East Antarctica cooling?
2) Why has air temperature apparently stabilized?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
4) What caused the mini Ice Age of the 1700s?
5) Why in the historical record do temperatures rise before CO2 rises?
And that's not even getting into the Holocene....
Well, maybe there is a simple explanation that results in it remaining plausible that the modern warm period is different from the Medieval being due wholly or mainly to CO2 emissions since what, 1850 or so, and not due to whatever caused the Medieval, and will not be followed by whatever caused the Mini Ice Age.
No, it can only be stopped by our ceasing to emit CO2. Like they suddenly did in 1400...?
Well, if there is a simple explanation along these lines, it would be very interesting to see someone write it down.
What Cupertino has always been looking for, and now maybe wonders if they have found at last, is an application that people really desperately want. Then they would tie it to the Mac platform, and MAKE those people buy Macs to run it. The prime exampe is the OS. Lets make them buy our hardware to run it.
Its a sort of pathological blinkered view of the world. The problem is, that whatever it is you are trying to make your customers buy, is not attractive enough on its merits. So, you have to force them. But when you do that, you lose a proportion of the market for whom your combined package dips below the competitive cost/performance threshold.
So, we make them buy the Mini, so they can get OSX on a reasonably priced standalone. And Minis sell, so we think its great. Which they would certainly not do otherwise. But what we do not see is the larger numbers who would be Apple customers today if they could get some hardware they liked better.
As a long term business strategy, it is a recipe for niche market share with periodic collapses as the killer app is duplicated by competitors without similar limitations and bundling requirements. This is essentially what happend with Win 95 and 98 and OS9. Part of the reason that it happens is the complacency it permits to flourish. So OS9 had fallen far behind, but because the bundling disguised the competitive situation, it allowed drift and denial.
All this is defended by Mac people with the mantra that 'Apple is a hardware company'. It cannot be true, can it? This is not how hardware companies behave. What hardware companies do is sell hardware, packaged any way the most customers want it. Hardware companies are software agnostic. If Apple really were a hardware company, you'd be able to get Macs running Windows out of the Apple stores.
The solution is to free the OS and the hardware people. Not to stop selling bundles to everyone who wants them, but to allow two divisions to maximize sales to others. The solution to the music business is the same. Stop trying to make people who do not want to buy bundles. Make the store compete on its merits, the players on their merits. And make sure the software runs better on Vista than any competitive product.
And stop telling us all that Apple is a this or a that. That is not the issue. The issue is what a sensible business strategy would have it become.
Not really. First, they would be careful who they licensed in such a case - bonds posted and so on.
Second, if you imagine the size of this in the real world, the record companies might have the right to withdraw the catalogue, but that would increasingly seem self defeating. All that would happen is, Apple would have to fix it going forward. Maybe by withdrawing the license? Maybe by firmware updates for everyone else. Don't start arguing there are no technical solutions, there will be.
Whatever the spin, there can be no serious doubt that the point of Fairplay as implemented is to lock in users to a combination of Apple software, the Apple music store and the Apple players. This is why sooner or later it will crash. The longer it goes, the worse the crash will be.
No, you are missing the point. There is no need to lock the tunes to the pod in order to have copy protection. They are both logically and technically distinct. To prevent unauthorized copying, what you need to do is mark the tune to the buyer. Then you can trace back unauthorized copies and prosecute. But the tune can play on any player the buyer chooses to use. There is no need to lock it to one particular brand of player.
What Apple has done is exactly the opposite of this. It has locked the tune to its own brand of player. However, if this locking is broken, there are no safeguards against unauthorized reporduction because no way to tie the tune to the buyer.
Maybe Apple sold the industry that by doing the second it was effectively doing the first, who knows? But the fact is, it chose a solution which is ineffective against piracy, but very effective against competitive suppliers of players.
This is the standard Apple explanation. If this is true, why is it that Apple sells DRMd music whose owners do not insist on it? Music that is available without DRM from other online stores?
Its simply not true. Apple could have introduced a form of copy protection for those labels who insist on it which did not lock iTunes to iPods. All you need to do is some form of watermarking which ties the bought tune to a particular buyer, and so prevents copying and sharing. But it chose not to, because that is Cupertino culture. Cupertino culture is lockins. Lock the OS to the hardware. Where possible, have non-standard interfaces. Lock the store to the purchasing software. Lock the tunes to the player.
The point, which is usually admitted in other forums than when you are putting out this weird propaganda, is to increase hardware sales. That's to say, to make people buy hardware they would otherwise reject, so as to get either your software or your tunes. Its a crazy and utterly repellent strategy. But if you are in Cupertino, it looks a lot easier and more palatable than making hardware people want to buy on its merits.
And the Party Line, or spin, which you then arrange to have sprayed all over the web by your adherents, goes "repeat after me: Apple is a hardware company". Yes, its a company that tries to make you buy hardware you do not want, to get software or tunes you do. That is what "Apple is a hardware company" means in practice. Nothing to do with being a hardware or a software company, but about being a lockin company.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you go to this rather than rebol? Which seems to have the advantage of offering easy to make guis as well. Whereas for a user interface don't you have to go to something like murgalua with Lua? Or are there other short cut gui designer environments for Lua?
Its called linked sales, coercive marketing, whatever. Its trying to force people to buy things they don't want to buy by linking them to things they do. Why should they do it? Because people are smarter than that, and it builds up resentment and bad feeling, and that lowers market share and profitability. Apple should do it because trying to make people who do not want to buy Macs or iPods is bad business. It doesn't actually increase the sales of iPods or Macs. Its stupid.
It is better to have people feel good about you. They will buy more this way than they ever will by being forced.
Same thing about OSX and Apple branded PCs by the way. Its a hiding to nowhere.
The Independent reported the exciting discovery of a viagra like substance in East European heather flowers. Garden Centres across the UK are being besieged by men of all ages.....
r ticle2411405.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/a
You're missing the point. The point is Apple (and MS) are competing with a movement all of whose members have access to all the work and all the progress and can take bits of it as they wish. This is what Ubuntu did with Debian. Its not about what Debian can do, its about what people can do with it. Or what Duval can do with Ubuntu. This is why they don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. This is what is going to be impossible to compete with. Its that Apple or MS are not competing with one company, or several independent ones. They are facing a movement. It really is a different business model.
As for citing Apple propaganda - don't be silly. The link does not prove OSX is open source, because obviously it isn't. Yes, I know it took chunks of BSD in the distant past. So did Windows. Who cares? Its the model we are talking about here.
They both follow the same model, which is to reinvent the wheel every time, and keep the code secret from the competitors. What they should both fear is a competitor who can always start where the last guy left off. This is how science advanced - Newton did not have to invent Euclid from scratch, and this is how Linux has advanced using shared libraries. This is how xorg got started in three months.
This is why they are both following an over costly and obsolete business model, and they will both fall. Apple maybe first, with its locked software and DRM mania. But both will go. Its just when.
Yes, this is the essence of the argument that has to be met. Its hard to see a plausible rebuttal.
It is very different from the iPod market when they entered. Go into any supermarket in the UK and you will find ten or fifteen phones on a rack at various prices from $50 to $200, and with varying contracts, or pay as you go. Everyone who wants a mobile has one - often they have more than one, and they work just fine. Its a different world from the MP3 market as it was when iPod started, and it is not clear that cool and expensive and locked is going to cut it in sufficient volume to justify the entry. And if it does, a month later it will be swamped with cheaper lookalikes.
Those who the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We'll see.
The general consensus seems to be that the iPhone will be a roaring success, and that any suggestion to the contrary is (a) stupid (b) malicious. But nowhere here do we see the argument addressed. The argument was that the phone market is highly competitive on both features and price, and very fast moving, and very different from Apple's other two markets, PCs and iPods. So it is being suggested that Apple will find itself unable to move fast enough, and unable to compete on price.
Whether this is true or not, it will take more than shouts of rage and abuse to refute it, because its a real argument. They do not in fact move very fast in Pods, by the standards of the phone industry. They refresh their PC line very slowly by the standards of the rest of the industry.
The risk reward ratio might favor John D on this one. Long term puts are very cheap right now, and if he turns out to be right, even if there is a low probability of his being right, the stock could easily fall by half. Cheap insurance if you own it, or cheap and good odds speculation if you don't. The issue with markets like this is not predicting them. Its how probable your predictions are, and what will happen if they are right or wrong, and what it costs to lay off your bets.
NOTE: This is not financial advice. This is an effort to make people think statistically about markets and company strategy.
They don't realize that the enemy is not file sharing or people getting their content for free. The real enemy is people buying only the tracks they want, and so lowering the average value of a purchase. The great thing about an LP/CD from a company point of view is that it was a bundle at a high price. This is a key difference between movie downloads and music downloads.
It is very hard to see how they get around this one. Prosecuting people will not take care of the move to singles. They probably cannot raise the price of the singles. It is hard to see how they ever reinstate the album purchase to where it was.
Yes, its tough. And they are not helping themselves by focussing on a completely different problem from the real one.
On a trip to the Far East some years ago, a fairly well informed colleague told me that Seiko had become so concerned about the potential damage to its reputation from badly made counterfeits, that it had started to make the counterfeits itself secretly in the effort to drive the counterfeiters out of the market. No idea if its true, but its a thought provoking line of reasoning.
1) Why does CO2 rise after temperature, in the historical record, if it causes it?
2) Why did the Wengeman report conclude that Mann's hockey stick was statistically unsound, if it is correct?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm period, and the little ice age, and the Holocene warming? Not the industrial revolution, surely?
4) Why did temperatures go up from 1800 to 1940, then fall from 1940 to 1975 (prompting the Global Cooling panic) and then rise from 1975 to now?
5) If its not the Sun that causes temperature variations, why are they so closely correlated with solar activity.
I really want to know the answer. Please do tell us.
Guys, for goodness' sake stop commenting on this flood of verbal diarrhea, you're just encouraging him.
Yes, sorry, that was a typo. The dude did indeed mean that OSX won't run on 95% of machines made today. He realizes that Vista will run on a very large proportion of them if not all. And people are right to say that it is more like 99% of machines that OSX will not run on.
As to the dude who writes about the one and the many, no, OSX and its hardware are not one, they are two, just like Windows and its hardware are two, not one. Want proof? Have a look at the CD that came with your machine. It probably contains OSX. Or is that a Platonic illusion?
Or Vista for that matter. Its crippled by its limited hardware support. It simply will not run on 95% of the computers manufactured today. Whatever its merits in terms of user features and security, this puts it out of contention for most people in most applications.
People often comment on these threads that there is a problem of people in IT departments and elsewhere being personally hostile to and prejudiced against Macs and Apple. Its true, and it happens because Apple marketing has deliberately denigrated all users of all other products at a personal level, and it puts peoples backs up.
The first thing they will have to do is revamp their marketing, disassociate themselves from the MacZealot tendency, stop positioning themselves as 'cool' and superior. Get away from 'think different' totally.
As long as they engage in culture wars, the other side will respond in kind, and you'll have a lot of people, as now, saying over my dead body to Macs in the corporation.
Oh, and they need to allow OSX to run on third party hardware, as well. Yes, its the same problem.
People fail to understand this kind of thing, its very sad.
The fact is, the only way to design hardware is if you control the software that will run on it. The really important thing is to deliver an integrated experience. This is impossible if you are selling a product like Windows that will run on any old crappy hardware, and explains the superior user experience and stability of the Mac. It is impossible as a phone maker, if you have to allow any old crappy software to run on your phone. And its also impossible if you are a network operator and are obliged to allow any old crappy phone AND crappy software to run on your nice shiny network.
Now at last phone manufacturers and network operators are starting to wake up, and they too will deliver the integrated user experience in the same way, by banning unintegrated software and unintegrated hardware both from running on their platforms. Its the exact mirror image of banning your OS from running on the wrong sort of uncontrolled hardware, and like that, its great news, and we must hope it catches on generally.
Ignorant customers will be the problem.
They seem not to appreciate the benefits of integration, and they keep trying to migrate to clones whenever they have the chance. Well, they are wrong, and they must be stopped. Fact is, repeat after me, "T-Mobile is a network company". It makes its money from calls. This is great for all of us, and especially for T-Mobile, and shows why their strategy has always been like this and must always be like this, and why it was quite wrong to compel ATT back in the mists of time to allow crap phones and switches to be connected to their network, and why Apple is so much better than Microsoft or Linux.
This is called the end-to-end model or sometimes the integrated end user experience. Long may it live and flourish! And not just in Cupertino!
Like all the other stuff that spews out over the net from RD, this should be treated as spam. Don't read it, don't comment on it. And for goodness sake can someone find something constructive for the guy to do with his time? Like programming something very obscure and complicated in machine language?
You already do have these right, for the simple reason which most people don't understand: after you buy something, the supplier will be violating competition law by imposing post sale restrictions on use. They are not enforceable. Whether in Eula, signed contract as you buy or any other form. You cannot impose post sales restrictions on use.
You have also bought it, not licensed it, because licensing requires some kind of continuing financial obligation.
Anyone who disputes this just has to produce either an EC or US case in which (a) a post sale restriction on use has been enforced by the courts, (b) a software sale at retail out of a retail channel has been held to be a license and not a sale.
Go ahead, if you can find one.
Thanks, very nice convincing article, and the dialogue is very good. Particularly liked the realclimate reference.
Was this meant to be an explanation of what exactly caused the Medieval Warm Period? And what caused the Mini Ice Age? And what the contribution of man-made CO2 was in either case? And why the East Antarctic is cooling? And why air temperatures seem to have stabilised? Not to mention what the Wegman report showed about the statistical inadequacies of the Hockey Stick?
Telling everyone to shut up and listen to their betters is not going to make this stuff go away.
The argument here is not solar forcing.
The argument is that the strength or weakness of solar radiation leads to cycles in the level of cloud cover, and that this in turn affects reflectivity of the earth, which in turns leads to variations in the rate of absorption from the sun.
Look at it as a variation of the argument that the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. The difference is, they have produced a plausible and experimentally verifiable non-human agency to account for why its concentration (in the form of clouds) may fluctuate cyclically, and they have tied it to previously verifiable fluctuations and coincidental temperature variations in the past.
Its not at all what solar forcing in the models tries to take account of.
There is really no need for accusations about funding and so on. Just answer some simple questions:
1) Why is East Antarctica cooling?
2) Why has air temperature apparently stabilized?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
4) What caused the mini Ice Age of the 1700s?
5) Why in the historical record do temperatures rise before CO2 rises?
And that's not even getting into the Holocene....
Well, maybe there is a simple explanation that results in it remaining plausible that the modern warm period is different from the Medieval being due wholly or mainly to CO2 emissions since what, 1850 or so, and not due to whatever caused the Medieval, and will not be followed by whatever caused the Mini Ice Age.
No, it can only be stopped by our ceasing to emit CO2. Like they suddenly did in 1400...?
Well, if there is a simple explanation along these lines, it would be very interesting to see someone write it down.
What Cupertino has always been looking for, and now maybe wonders if they have found at last, is an application that people really desperately want. Then they would tie it to the Mac platform, and MAKE those people buy Macs to run it. The prime exampe is the OS. Lets make them buy our hardware to run it.
Its a sort of pathological blinkered view of the world. The problem is, that whatever it is you are trying to make your customers buy, is not attractive enough on its merits. So, you have to force them. But when you do that, you lose a proportion of the market for whom your combined package dips below the competitive cost/performance threshold.
So, we make them buy the Mini, so they can get OSX on a reasonably priced standalone. And Minis sell, so we think its great. Which they would certainly not do otherwise. But what we do not see is the larger numbers who would be Apple customers today if they could get some hardware they liked better.
As a long term business strategy, it is a recipe for niche market share with periodic collapses as the killer app is duplicated by competitors without similar limitations and bundling requirements. This is essentially what happend with Win 95 and 98 and OS9. Part of the reason that it happens is the complacency it permits to flourish. So OS9 had fallen far behind, but because the bundling disguised the competitive situation, it allowed drift and denial.
All this is defended by Mac people with the mantra that 'Apple is a hardware company'. It cannot be true, can it? This is not how hardware companies behave. What hardware companies do is sell hardware, packaged any way the most customers want it. Hardware companies are software agnostic. If Apple really were a hardware company, you'd be able to get Macs running Windows out of the Apple stores.
The solution is to free the OS and the hardware people. Not to stop selling bundles to everyone who wants them, but to allow two divisions to maximize sales to others. The solution to the music business is the same. Stop trying to make people who do not want to buy bundles. Make the store compete on its merits, the players on their merits. And make sure the software runs better on Vista than any competitive product.
And stop telling us all that Apple is a this or a that. That is not the issue. The issue is what a sensible business strategy would have it become.
See it now?
Not really. First, they would be careful who they licensed in such a case - bonds posted and so on.
Second, if you imagine the size of this in the real world, the record companies might have the right to withdraw the catalogue, but that would increasingly seem self defeating. All that would happen is, Apple would have to fix it going forward. Maybe by withdrawing the license? Maybe by firmware updates for everyone else. Don't start arguing there are no technical solutions, there will be.
Whatever the spin, there can be no serious doubt that the point of Fairplay as implemented is to lock in users to a combination of Apple software, the Apple music store and the Apple players. This is why sooner or later it will crash. The longer it goes, the worse the crash will be.
No, you are missing the point. There is no need to lock the tunes to the pod in order to have copy protection. They are both logically and technically distinct. To prevent unauthorized copying, what you need to do is mark the tune to the buyer. Then you can trace back unauthorized copies and prosecute. But the tune can play on any player the buyer chooses to use. There is no need to lock it to one particular brand of player.
What Apple has done is exactly the opposite of this. It has locked the tune to its own brand of player. However, if this locking is broken, there are no safeguards against unauthorized reporduction because no way to tie the tune to the buyer.
Maybe Apple sold the industry that by doing the second it was effectively doing the first, who knows? But the fact is, it chose a solution which is ineffective against piracy, but very effective against competitive suppliers of players.
Do you really believe this was an accident?
This is the standard Apple explanation. If this is true, why is it that Apple sells DRMd music whose owners do not insist on it? Music that is available without DRM from other online stores?
Its simply not true. Apple could have introduced a form of copy protection for those labels who insist on it which did not lock iTunes to iPods. All you need to do is some form of watermarking which ties the bought tune to a particular buyer, and so prevents copying and sharing. But it chose not to, because that is Cupertino culture. Cupertino culture is lockins. Lock the OS to the hardware. Where possible, have non-standard interfaces. Lock the store to the purchasing software. Lock the tunes to the player.
The point, which is usually admitted in other forums than when you are putting out this weird propaganda, is to increase hardware sales. That's to say, to make people buy hardware they would otherwise reject, so as to get either your software or your tunes. Its a crazy and utterly repellent strategy. But if you are in Cupertino, it looks a lot easier and more palatable than making hardware people want to buy on its merits.
And the Party Line, or spin, which you then arrange to have sprayed all over the web by your adherents, goes "repeat after me: Apple is a hardware company". Yes, its a company that tries to make you buy hardware you do not want, to get software or tunes you do. That is what "Apple is a hardware company" means in practice. Nothing to do with being a hardware or a software company, but about being a lockin company.