Wrong. Basically this is a ruling that says the US has a constitution, protects the press broadly defined, and if you are Apple, yes, even if you are Apple, tough. The US still has a constitution. If you like it, or if you don't.
Yes, despite all those things, Apple is probably violating the ban on anti competitive linked sales. It is selling Tunes which it restricts to playing on its own players, when (and this is the critical thing) it is in EC law a monopoly, because it has more than 25% share.
Now, you may not like this, but before you get so excited about the unreasonable socialistic Europeans, start examining how US anti-trust and competition law work. Were you out there saying that IBM should be able to do what it wanted, and if people didn't want to buy from them they didn't have to, back at the time of the consent decrees and the compatibles? Were you out there at the time of the Carterphone decision, saying that ATT should be able to restrict as it wished what was connected to its network? Were you out there on the streets demonstrating in favor of Microsofts freedom to send whatever messages it wanted from the Windows 3.1 overlay to DRDOS users? After all, they could ignore them. Did you think MS should be able to charge OEMs for every computer sold, running Windows or not? After all, no OEM had to sign up for Windows. Did you support the right of various Third World steel producers to sell below cost in the US? After all, no-one had to buy it.
No, you did not. You were very happy for US anti trust and competition law to bite those guys, to bite them hard, and even to break up the Bell System in the end.
So what is different in this case? It is Apple, that is all that is different.
Cultists, who do not even understand the laws of their own country!
Typical of the level of debate here, and hardly worth answering, but here goes. The CD is an open format in that anyone can make a player, and any CD will play on it. The iTune is not an open format, because they will only play on Apple players. It is perfectly possible, as the CD or DVD or MP3 case shows, to introduce a new format without locking it to players from one supplier.
Norway (and increasingly the EC) is simply saying that they want downloaded music to work like CDs. Or DVDs. Or MP3s. Or JPEGs. Or GIFs. Anyone, they say, should be able to make players to play them. Or alternatively, they should be playable on any player.
Is this so hard to understand....because it means that Apple would have to do something different to comply?
Difference is, you can get a vending machine from a third party machine supplier and put what you want in it. It would be different if coke would only permit inclusion of its drinks in its own vending machines.
The Apple case is, you can't play its iTunes on other vendors machines. Like Coke saying, my drink, only in my machine. Idea is totally ludicrous.
See my reply above. The supplier is legally a monopoly, having greater than 25% share of the applicable market. And it is engaging in linked sales, which are anti competitive when you are a monopoly.
Why should the FCC restrict collusion among manufacturers to set prices? What is the value of the Robinson-Patman Act?
Its just the law. The reason we and the US have these laws is to prevent monopolistic abuses and make for freerer and more competitive markets. Now, maybe you don't like these. That's an interesting argument. but its not about iTunes or Apple.
In the EC a monopoly is any supplier with greater than 25% of the applicable market. Apple is thus legally a monopoly.
Once you are a monopoly, you can't do linked sales. They are anti competitive.
The view of iTunes is no different from what the EC view would be of a phone company only permitting the use of its phones to connect to its network. Unlawful. Or a car company forbidding the use of third party parts. Unlawful. Or MS trying to stop you running Office under Wine. Unlawful.
The EC has lots of experience with anti competitive behaviour and restraints of trade, and the Apple thing is just one small application of a set of laws which have worked well in a variety of areas.
Note that the point is also not that companies have to make things inter operable. They do not. But they cannot, when they are monopolies, wilfully in restraint of trade make them unusable with other things they naturally are usable with. This is the problem with iTunes. The MP3s are naturally playable by other players. They are however encrypted in such a way as to prevent it.
What the EC is going to want Apple to do is, protect copyright (eg by watermarking or whatever) if it needs to, but in some way that allows interoperability.
Now, you may not think EC law is good. But its not Apple you should be discussing. Its whether 25% is a reasonable threshold, and whether linked sales are anti competitive. In general. For tires, disk drives, food processors, whatever.
The next problem would be an interesting one. Would they, as a record company, sign an exclusive deal with themselves? Would they, that is, sign up bands with the proviso that their music would be sold only to be played on iPods?
Or would they sign up bands and tell them, we don't care. We are interesting in selling music. People play it on Pods or Zunes, who cares, their dollars are all green...?
From TA: "Hu stressed the need to exploit the net's possibilities, while keeping a tight grip. "Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he concluded."
In other unreported comments he went on to explain China's new computer initiative involving Linux and the new Chinese made and developed hardware. He said that his remarks applied equally to the new smart phone due to be released at the Beijing summer IT fair.
"It is exactly the same", he said "ensure also that one hand grasps hardware while the other grasps the OS. This way all users are given full integrated experience and can exploit potential of modern computer science to maximum without distraction from driver problem.
"Ensure one hand grasps phone network while other hand grasps mobile appliance. Only so can stability of both be assured and West China networks kept immune from crashes.
"Ensure also one hand around throat of developers and other around phone application environment. So can help users avoid distraction by non optimally working applications not authorized by Party.
"In coming weeks will be propounding further on four principles of making happy users and clean and healthy computing and phoning environment: protect OS, protect hardware, protect applications, protect networks. Trust in Party."
I am very surprised these inspiring comments, which will alas strike a chord with only one or two Western computing and mobile phone companies, and which are a devastating if tactful correction to the whole Open Source movement, failed to find their way into the press.
Legally, in the EU, monopoly has a specific meaning: more than 25% share of the applicable market. That's when you start to be treated legally as a monopoly.
My sources tell me that, as usual, the most serious charges are related to secondary offenses.
In the present case what is terrifying Government Ministers and senior figures in New Labour is that they may be charged with anti competitive behaviour and market manipulation - distorting the free market in peerages and other honours, and colluding with other honours suppliers. If the police start to suspect something like this has gone on, the Office of Fair Trading and the European Commission could get involved, and you know that when the Competition Directorate moves, terror strikes.
It is truly tragic. Britain was always famous around the world as the country that operated the most open and transparent market for honours of all sorts. Its a great pity it has come to this.
"This is great. It will encourage more people to move to Leopard at a faster rate. More revenue for Apple. More profits for Apple. More Macs for us to buy. Yea!"
This is a comment on the site. Most illuminating, people who do not know the difference between their own interests and that of other people.
We seem to be approaching a critical moment in these things. First there is the copy protection provisions of Visa, which must provoke protest when they get going in the market. Second, there's the pending release of Leopard. Now, its hard to see how they avoid releasing retail x86 versions of Leopard, and when they do, its hard to believe people won't crack them within weeks and install it on any x86 they want. Third, there is Open Moko, which looks set to test the locked smart phone model to destruction. And now we have a solution to the piracy problem, which conveniently deprives Apple and MS of the excuse that they are only locking their music to their players because the music industry makes them.
We might hope for a number of things to happen. First for Open Moko to take off and eclipse iPhone. Second, for Leopard to emerge and force unlocking from Mac hardware. Third, for the nakedness of the iTunes and Zune lockins to become totally obvious to everyone, and for such lockins to become uncool and generally despicable. Fourth, for people to refuse to tolerate the remote degradation of their Vista hardware as a penalty for some alleged possibly imaginary misdemeanor in the content they try to play.
This could be the year the whole thing blows up with a bang!
You are (not surprisingly) expecting it to make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is Roughly Drafted. This is the place where we heard that Windows has 48% market share, because it seems, puzzlingly, not to be hardware. And where we tried to prove that despite SP 1-4 being free, they really cost more than the OSX upgrades which cost $100 each.
Its a funny mixture of MacSpam and MacFud. Goodness knows why he keeps doing it. It is probably doing more to undermine the credibility and reputation of Apple and Macs than any of its supposed enemies....
What you have to realize is, the NYT matters./. doesn't matter. Whatever you think about Apple, however much you want to make all kinds of excuses for it, when the NYT starts calling the Apple lockins 'crippleware', the world has changed. Apple is no longer cool. The iPhone isn't cool. Its just dysfunctional.
Its right there on the technology page. Apple just made an enormous howler. Time to stop making those excuses, because no-one is listening. Its like the invasion of Hungary. Sorry, the fraternal intervention in support of our comrades. No-one was listening after that either. This was the point where the rest of us could no longer avoid confronting what exactly Apple is, because its so in your face. And this is when they lost us.
People need to get real about Apple. Much of this thread just consists of saying that when Apple does it, it doesn't count. It does count. Apple is the leading exponent in our industry of the customer lockin. Now, this makes things uncomfortable for the devotees, who realize that lockins and DRM are decidedly uncool and ethically very dubious, and associated with the arch enemy MS. So they spend a lot of their time in intellectual contortions trying to deny that Apple is what it is. It is a bit like trying to argue that the former Soviet Union was really very free and democratic. Same sort of silly contortions and denials. Facts:
1) OSX is not open source. Its as proprietary as Windows.
2) You still cannot buy a retail copy of OSX that will run on your shiny old MacIntel. You only get to buy either an upgrade or a retail pack for PPC. Can you think of any legitimate reason for this other than lockin?
3) Despite the fact that the MacIntel is a standard enough Intel box, Apple has gone to great lengths to lock OSX to only those Intel boxes that it has blessed with its logo. No technical reason, its pure lockin.
4) iTunes is a locked system. Yes, you do have to use the Apple software to buy an iTune, and then once you have it, you can't play it on another player without going through contortions and losing quality and maybe violating the DMCA. There is no reason to refuse to license fairplay other than a deliberate effort at consumer lockin.
5) Jobs did say, to the NY Times, that you won't be able to run your own software on the iPhone. The laugable reason given was to protect you and the cellular network. But it fits with all the rest. Its just about control and lockin. As is the taboo on unlocking it and moving it to another network.
Add it all together, and its not much different from MS in approach. The details vary, but the approach and the aim are identical. It stinks. What Apple people need to do is stop denying this. Stop justifying it on the grounds that it helps sell Macs. Of course it does, that is the entire point of lockins, to make you buy things you otherwise would not.
You may all like the fact that the trains run on time, but no, there are no elections and there never will be any. Just accept publicly that lockin is the price you are prepared to pay for your chosen platform and the prosperity of your chosen company. But don't tell the rest of us that black is really white, and there really is no lockin. There is, and it stinks.
It isn't insane. Any more than the snowstorm which unseated Mayor Lindsay was insane. Its just weather. It varies. Weather events have quite a spread-out long tailed distribution. Like a number of things. Reacting to the occurrence of one of the events from the tails with indignation and dismay is just silly. It is in fact being in denial about the nature of the world we live in. Like getting upset by so called freak waves, which are not freak at all, just occur infrequently but regularly. Warm winters, cool summers. They happen. Why expect otherwise? Why think it is anything but weather?
It may have been, in North America, the warmest year, by a small amount, for a couple hundred years. Its a bit different. We have also the Holcene Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period to worry about, before pronouncing last year the warmest ever.
Global warming may or may not be happening, but headlines like this do not help convince anyone.
Think you've got the last two points wrong. First, the range of hardware has nothing to do with stability any more. It might have done 10 or 15 years ago. Though, when the argument about stability from a wide range of hardware was valid for Windows, it was also at a time when Apple was using OS9, and the balance of instability from W98 on was probably in favour of Windows. Windows crashed more from hardware problems, but less from OS problems, and the Mac OS stability problems were greater than the Windows hardware ones. Nowadays supporting lots of different hardware is not a stability issue at all.
Second point wrong is its being good for Apple to make people buy the hardware. This completely illogical argument comes up all the time. If it is so great for the buyer and Mac user to have their hardware and OS from the same vendor, why would they, if given a choice, buy any other hardware than Apple's? So, why does the OS need to be locked to the hardware? Is it perhaps because the average Mac user, given the chance, would abandon the imaginary benefits of integration in a flash, in favor of being able to buy the hardware he really wants and needs?
Finally, we have the usual mantra of "repeat after me - Apple is a hardware company". Why do Mac people keep on chanting this in this crazed cult like way? The issue is not, what Apple's current business strategy is. We all know what it is. The issue is, what it should be. And the issue is not, what is good for Apple. The issue is, what is good for us. Of which, amazingly enough, we and not Cupertino are the best judges.
Don't think so. This is not news from months ago. The real news is the FT story, whose implications are quite startling. And its come out AFTER the decline has already started, presumably being the occasion of the decline. This one could run for a while and have quite interesting consequences.
A classic, absolutely classic instance of the thesis which Olson demonstrated in lots of case studies.
All special interest groups will find it in their interests to impose on society costs hundreds, thousands, millions of times greater than the benefits they receive.
In the present case, Big Content, to protect its rents, is imposing measures which will end up costing the US and the West enormously more than any benefits to Big Content.
But they don't care, of course, because even if we are all worse off, they are a little better off.
And so, you discover if you examine economic history, that revolutionary convulsions every 50 years or so benefit economic performance, by abolishing encrusted priveliges of various groups. And this is why 19c France in constant turmoil outgrew 19c stable Britain. And why the post civil war South did so well in the 20c... And why Germany grew so fast in the fifties.
And why the US is falling into paralysis today....
Slashdot Mirror
No. The journalist wasn't protecting anyone who broke the law. They may have broken a civil contract. Its not illegal to do that.
"Is this a valid way to provide feedback to the government or merely an exercise in keeping the populace happy?"
Neither. It is a way of compiling a database of potential troublemakers.
Wrong. Basically this is a ruling that says the US has a constitution, protects the press broadly defined, and if you are Apple, yes, even if you are Apple, tough. The US still has a constitution. If you like it, or if you don't.
Yes, despite all those things, Apple is probably violating the ban on anti competitive linked sales. It is selling Tunes which it restricts to playing on its own players, when (and this is the critical thing) it is in EC law a monopoly, because it has more than 25% share.
Now, you may not like this, but before you get so excited about the unreasonable socialistic Europeans, start examining how US anti-trust and competition law work. Were you out there saying that IBM should be able to do what it wanted, and if people didn't want to buy from them they didn't have to, back at the time of the consent decrees and the compatibles? Were you out there at the time of the Carterphone decision, saying that ATT should be able to restrict as it wished what was connected to its network? Were you out there on the streets demonstrating in favor of Microsofts freedom to send whatever messages it wanted from the Windows 3.1 overlay to DRDOS users? After all, they could ignore them. Did you think MS should be able to charge OEMs for every computer sold, running Windows or not? After all, no OEM had to sign up for Windows. Did you support the right of various Third World steel producers to sell below cost in the US? After all, no-one had to buy it.
No, you did not. You were very happy for US anti trust and competition law to bite those guys, to bite them hard, and even to break up the Bell System in the end.
So what is different in this case? It is Apple, that is all that is different.
Cultists, who do not even understand the laws of their own country!
Typical of the level of debate here, and hardly worth answering, but here goes. The CD is an open format in that anyone can make a player, and any CD will play on it. The iTune is not an open format, because they will only play on Apple players. It is perfectly possible, as the CD or DVD or MP3 case shows, to introduce a new format without locking it to players from one supplier.
Norway (and increasingly the EC) is simply saying that they want downloaded music to work like CDs. Or DVDs. Or MP3s. Or JPEGs. Or GIFs. Anyone, they say, should be able to make players to play them. Or alternatively, they should be playable on any player.
Is this so hard to understand....because it means that Apple would have to do something different to comply?
Do you want to abolish the FCC, the Robinson-Patman Act? Have a look at
http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/other/dvspeech.htm
and try to understand a little better where you are living.
Difference is, you can get a vending machine from a third party machine supplier and put what you want in it. It would be different if coke would only permit inclusion of its drinks in its own vending machines.
The Apple case is, you can't play its iTunes on other vendors machines. Like Coke saying, my drink, only in my machine. Idea is totally ludicrous.
See my reply above. The supplier is legally a monopoly, having greater than 25% share of the applicable market. And it is engaging in linked sales, which are anti competitive when you are a monopoly.
Why should the FCC restrict collusion among manufacturers to set prices? What is the value of the Robinson-Patman Act?
Its just the law. The reason we and the US have these laws is to prevent monopolistic abuses and make for freerer and more competitive markets. Now, maybe you don't like these. That's an interesting argument. but its not about iTunes or Apple.
You don't get it.
In the EC a monopoly is any supplier with greater than 25% of the applicable market. Apple is thus legally a monopoly.
Once you are a monopoly, you can't do linked sales. They are anti competitive.
The view of iTunes is no different from what the EC view would be of a phone company only permitting the use of its phones to connect to its network. Unlawful. Or a car company forbidding the use of third party parts. Unlawful. Or MS trying to stop you running Office under Wine. Unlawful.
The EC has lots of experience with anti competitive behaviour and restraints of trade, and the Apple thing is just one small application of a set of laws which have worked well in a variety of areas.
Note that the point is also not that companies have to make things inter operable. They do not. But they cannot, when they are monopolies, wilfully in restraint of trade make them unusable with other things they naturally are usable with. This is the problem with iTunes. The MP3s are naturally playable by other players. They are however encrypted in such a way as to prevent it.
What the EC is going to want Apple to do is, protect copyright (eg by watermarking or whatever) if it needs to, but in some way that allows interoperability.
Now, you may not think EC law is good. But its not Apple you should be discussing. Its whether 25% is a reasonable threshold, and whether linked sales are anti competitive. In general. For tires, disk drives, food processors, whatever.
The next problem would be an interesting one. Would they, as a record company, sign an exclusive deal with themselves? Would they, that is, sign up bands with the proviso that their music would be sold only to be played on iPods?
Or would they sign up bands and tell them, we don't care. We are interesting in selling music. People play it on Pods or Zunes, who cares, their dollars are all green...?
From TA: "Hu stressed the need to exploit the net's possibilities, while keeping a tight grip. "Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he concluded."
In other unreported comments he went on to explain China's new computer initiative involving Linux and the new Chinese made and developed hardware. He said that his remarks applied equally to the new smart phone due to be released at the Beijing summer IT fair.
"It is exactly the same", he said "ensure also that one hand grasps hardware while the other grasps the OS. This way all users are given full integrated experience and can exploit potential of modern computer science to maximum without distraction from driver problem.
"Ensure one hand grasps phone network while other hand grasps mobile appliance. Only so can stability of both be assured and West China networks kept immune from crashes.
"Ensure also one hand around throat of developers and other around phone application environment. So can help users avoid distraction by non optimally working applications not authorized by Party.
"In coming weeks will be propounding further on four principles of making happy users and clean and healthy computing and phoning environment: protect OS, protect hardware, protect applications, protect networks. Trust in Party."
I am very surprised these inspiring comments, which will alas strike a chord with only one or two Western computing and mobile phone companies, and which are a devastating if tactful correction to the whole Open Source movement, failed to find their way into the press.
Legally, in the EU, monopoly has a specific meaning: more than 25% share of the applicable market. That's when you start to be treated legally as a monopoly.
My sources tell me that, as usual, the most serious charges are related to secondary offenses.
In the present case what is terrifying Government Ministers and senior figures in New Labour is that they may be charged with anti competitive behaviour and market manipulation - distorting the free market in peerages and other honours, and colluding with other honours suppliers. If the police start to suspect something like this has gone on, the Office of Fair Trading and the European Commission could get involved, and you know that when the Competition Directorate moves, terror strikes.
It is truly tragic. Britain was always famous around the world as the country that operated the most open and transparent market for honours of all sorts. Its a great pity it has come to this.
"This is great. It will encourage more people to move to Leopard at a faster rate.
More revenue for Apple. More profits for Apple. More Macs for us to buy. Yea!"
This is a comment on the site. Most illuminating, people who do not know the difference between their own interests and that of other people.
Hardly know where to begin....
We seem to be approaching a critical moment in these things. First there is the copy protection provisions of Visa, which must provoke protest when they get going in the market. Second, there's the pending release of Leopard. Now, its hard to see how they avoid releasing retail x86 versions of Leopard, and when they do, its hard to believe people won't crack them within weeks and install it on any x86 they want. Third, there is Open Moko, which looks set to test the locked smart phone model to destruction. And now we have a solution to the piracy problem, which conveniently deprives Apple and MS of the excuse that they are only locking their music to their players because the music industry makes them.
We might hope for a number of things to happen. First for Open Moko to take off and eclipse iPhone. Second, for Leopard to emerge and force unlocking from Mac hardware. Third, for the nakedness of the iTunes and Zune lockins to become totally obvious to everyone, and for such lockins to become uncool and generally despicable. Fourth, for people to refuse to tolerate the remote degradation of their Vista hardware as a penalty for some alleged possibly imaginary misdemeanor in the content they try to play.
This could be the year the whole thing blows up with a bang!
You are (not surprisingly) expecting it to make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is Roughly Drafted. This is the place where we heard that Windows has 48% market share, because it seems, puzzlingly, not to be hardware. And where we tried to prove that despite SP 1-4 being free, they really cost more than the OSX upgrades which cost $100 each.
n dex.html
t -helping-the-mac-community/
Its a funny mixture of MacSpam and MacFud. Goodness knows why he keeps doing it. It is probably doing more to undermine the credibility and reputation of Apple and Macs than any of its supposed enemies....
http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/personal/i
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/15/fuzzy-tactics-aren
What you have to realize is, the NYT matters. /. doesn't matter. Whatever you think about Apple, however much you want to make all kinds of excuses for it, when the NYT starts calling the Apple lockins 'crippleware', the world has changed. Apple is no longer cool. The iPhone isn't cool. Its just dysfunctional.
Its right there on the technology page. Apple just made an enormous howler. Time to stop making those excuses, because no-one is listening. Its like the invasion of Hungary. Sorry, the fraternal intervention in support of our comrades. No-one was listening after that either. This was the point where the rest of us could no longer avoid confronting what exactly Apple is, because its so in your face. And this is when they lost us.
People need to get real about Apple. Much of this thread just consists of saying that when Apple does it, it doesn't count. It does count. Apple is the leading exponent in our industry of the customer lockin. Now, this makes things uncomfortable for the devotees, who realize that lockins and DRM are decidedly uncool and ethically very dubious, and associated with the arch enemy MS. So they spend a lot of their time in intellectual contortions trying to deny that Apple is what it is. It is a bit like trying to argue that the former Soviet Union was really very free and democratic. Same sort of silly contortions and denials. Facts:
1) OSX is not open source. Its as proprietary as Windows.
2) You still cannot buy a retail copy of OSX that will run on your shiny old MacIntel. You only get to buy either an upgrade or a retail pack for PPC. Can you think of any legitimate reason for this other than lockin?
3) Despite the fact that the MacIntel is a standard enough Intel box, Apple has gone to great lengths to lock OSX to only those Intel boxes that it has blessed with its logo. No technical reason, its pure lockin.
4) iTunes is a locked system. Yes, you do have to use the Apple software to buy an iTune, and then once you have it, you can't play it on another player without going through contortions and losing quality and maybe violating the DMCA. There is no reason to refuse to license fairplay other than a deliberate effort at consumer lockin.
5) Jobs did say, to the NY Times, that you won't be able to run your own software on the iPhone. The laugable reason given was to protect you and the cellular network. But it fits with all the rest. Its just about control and lockin. As is the taboo on unlocking it and moving it to another network.
Add it all together, and its not much different from MS in approach. The details vary, but the approach and the aim are identical. It stinks. What Apple people need to do is stop denying this. Stop justifying it on the grounds that it helps sell Macs. Of course it does, that is the entire point of lockins, to make you buy things you otherwise would not.
You may all like the fact that the trains run on time, but no, there are no elections and there never will be any. Just accept publicly that lockin is the price you are prepared to pay for your chosen platform and the prosperity of your chosen company. But don't tell the rest of us that black is really white, and there really is no lockin. There is, and it stinks.
And its not at all cool either.
Thank Heaven these people only have 5% share of PC market. If they had the power, they would be worse than MS!
It isn't insane. Any more than the snowstorm which unseated Mayor Lindsay was insane. Its just weather. It varies. Weather events have quite a spread-out long tailed distribution. Like a number of things. Reacting to the occurrence of one of the events from the tails with indignation and dismay is just silly. It is in fact being in denial about the nature of the world we live in. Like getting upset by so called freak waves, which are not freak at all, just occur infrequently but regularly. Warm winters, cool summers. They happen. Why expect otherwise? Why think it is anything but weather?
It was not globally the warmest year ever.
It may have been, in North America, the warmest year, by a small amount, for a couple hundred years. Its a bit different. We have also the Holcene Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period to worry about, before pronouncing last year the warmest ever.
Global warming may or may not be happening, but headlines like this do not help convince anyone.
Its also only half a computer company. So if you like, its 25% a computer hardware company now. 25% OS. And 50% iPod.
Think you've got the last two points wrong. First, the range of hardware has nothing to do with stability any more. It might have done 10 or 15 years ago. Though, when the argument about stability from a wide range of hardware was valid for Windows, it was also at a time when Apple was using OS9, and the balance of instability from W98 on was probably in favour of Windows. Windows crashed more from hardware problems, but less from OS problems, and the Mac OS stability problems were greater than the Windows hardware ones. Nowadays supporting lots of different hardware is not a stability issue at all.
Second point wrong is its being good for Apple to make people buy the hardware. This completely illogical argument comes up all the time. If it is so great for the buyer and Mac user to have their hardware and OS from the same vendor, why would they, if given a choice, buy any other hardware than Apple's? So, why does the OS need to be locked to the hardware? Is it perhaps because the average Mac user, given the chance, would abandon the imaginary benefits of integration in a flash, in favor of being able to buy the hardware he really wants and needs?
Finally, we have the usual mantra of "repeat after me - Apple is a hardware company". Why do Mac people keep on chanting this in this crazed cult like way? The issue is not, what Apple's current business strategy is. We all know what it is. The issue is, what it should be. And the issue is not, what is good for Apple. The issue is, what is good for us. Of which, amazingly enough, we and not Cupertino are the best judges.
Don't think so. This is not news from months ago. The real news is the FT story, whose implications are quite startling. And its come out AFTER the decline has already started, presumably being the occasion of the decline. This one could run for a while and have quite interesting consequences.
A classic, absolutely classic instance of the thesis which Olson demonstrated in lots of case studies.
All special interest groups will find it in their interests to impose on society costs hundreds, thousands, millions of times greater than the benefits they receive.
In the present case, Big Content, to protect its rents, is imposing measures which will end up costing the US and the West enormously more than any benefits to Big Content.
But they don't care, of course, because even if we are all worse off, they are a little better off.
And so, you discover if you examine economic history, that revolutionary convulsions every 50 years or so benefit economic performance, by abolishing encrusted priveliges of various groups. And this is why 19c France in constant turmoil outgrew 19c stable Britain. And why the post civil war South did so well in the 20c... And why Germany grew so fast in the fifties.
And why the US is falling into paralysis today....