The difference is that you can't push a button on your PC and dump out a plain, unencumbered disk containing Windows that you can then use on your replacement PC, or to reinstall on your PC after you do a significant upgrade, etc. You have to call India and ask for permission to use your copy of Windows.
With iTunes, there is a barrier to prevent wholesale, effortless dumping of paid music into Napster style sharing bin, but there is little real barrier to using your music in your car CD changer, or getting it on a Sansa, an Xbox, or wherever else you might want it: you burn a CD.
No, there is a choice. The iPod requires no DRM. The use of DRM FairPlay content from the iTunes Store is entirely up to the consumer, who can choose to use their own MP3s, buy CDs and rip, or even just use iTunes to access free Podcast content through iTunes and other sources.
There are no features on the iPod that demand DRM. Zero.
Microsoft's PlaysForSure and the competing Zune are based on DRM. The centerpiece of PFS is subscription music, which requires complex DRM on the player. The iPod intentionally *can't* delete your content or prevent you from listening to it past the end of the month. The highly touted feature of Zune is wireless sharing, which is similarly encrusted with DRM restrictions. Even if the device does not re-encode the files, it does quarantine them to prevent second hand sharing and terminates them before others can use them. It's DRM.
So you are lying: Microsoft is not at all forthcoming about DRM, it's lying and hiding its unfair DRM manifesto. Windows and Office are now both crippled by invasive and draconian DRM "activation" that is unfair and abusive, as is their Janus / WMA media player technology and products based upon it. Microsoft invented Palladium, remember?
WMA and WGA are abusive DRM for your media and OS: unreasonably stacked in the vendor's favor, subject to change unilaterally, and priced by a monopoly power, not the market.
For you to ignore all that and turn around and try to vilify the iPod--which provides the least offensive DRM system as an optional side dish--makes it clear who the "fanboi" really is.
In the same sense that a militarized police state is great unless you're a terrorist or a critic of the government. The two "seem" to go together.
WGA is abusive DRM for your OS: unreasonably stacked in the vendor's favor, subject to change unilaterally, and priced by a monopoly power, not the market.
Microsoft is just a company, but the actions it takes and policies it has set reflect the personalities of its leaders. Over the last three decades, Microsoft has used its position to do very little. It has not ushered in new technology, but rather remained on top by blocking superior competition using fradulent business practices.
Examples: In 1981, Microsoft said it would deliver the same graphical UI that Apple, Amiga, Atari and others were working on. Everyone else delivered in the mid 80s except for Microsoft, which couldn't release a product anyone wanted to buy until Windows 3.0 in 1990. It was still crap. Windows 95, a full decade late, was derivative and unoriginal, certaily not anything new.
1990s Cairo, in 1991, promised to deliver ideas beyond those offered by NeXT, Apple, IBM, and Novell... but never did. Those companies all released technologies Microsoft planned, before Microsoft did - a half decade or more before, in an industry where a year is forever. Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
In addition to Cairo as an operating system, Microsoft did the EXACT same thing with Quicktime and the PenPoint and Newton handhelds: annonce a lot, deliver ten years late, if at all.
Microsoft also worked to kill every open standard that threatened its Windows monopoly, including the Java VM and the web browser. Once the threat was terminated, development slowed to a crawl. Today they are working against PDF, OpenGL, JPEG, and MP3, hoping to install and maintain their own proprietary standards.
2000s Cairo was repeated as Longhorn, delayed for years, then stripped of any interesting features and dumped out many years late in Vista, which is highly derivative of Mac OS X.
Where is this company's contributions: Clippy? Yes, Microsoft has worked on some interesting things and does have products that work. They're just decades late and have sat on top of better products from other companies who delivered the same technology much earlier. A company with as much clout and resources as Microsoft has some accountability to actualy deliver and lead. It hasn't.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste; they have absolutely no taste. And what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way - in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.. And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success; I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success, in the most part; I have a problem with the fact they make really third rate products." -- Steve Jobs, in 'Triumph of the Nerds'
Microsoft is good a making announcements, the real problem is in delivering products they've promised.
"Microsoft introduced a new product vision called Cairo in 1991; it ended up disrupting development and marginalizing competition throughout the next decade. The tactic worked so well that Microsoft repeated it in the following decade as Longhorn. Here's how it happened, and why Microsoft won't be able to repeat the same fraud again."
The real point is that the hypothetical problem you're trying to invent does not exist.
Nobody is buying GBs of iTunes tracks without the understanding that they are designed to optimally play on the iPod. FairPlay songs are ~4 MB. To even have 40 GBs of FairPlay music, you'd need to buy around $10,000 of iTunes songs. Who the fuck has done that? It's bullshit pushed by people like you, or Napster, who famounsly insisted in its advertising that filling up an iPod cost $10,000. Clearly, you are both full of shit.
For somebody who has bought a few albums and decides they really want a Sansa player, the option exists to burn CDs. The majority of iPod users don't need to buy anything - all their CDs just work, and they can continue to buy CDs, using iTS to buy one off tracks when convenient. And they are not interested in other players, for the same reason the market in general is not interested in them: they are nearly all crap.
For somebody investing in PlayedForSure, say Napster, the songs they bought are not transferable to any other player, including the Zoops, a fact you skirted in your intent to repeat Microsoft's "talking points." If you're really fooled by the illusion that Microsoft hasn't really and truely abandonded PFS, then why do you suposed that Peter Sealey, a professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, described Microsoft's PlayedForSure move in the words: "I've never seen a business so blatantly screw its business partners."
Anyone buying a PlaysForSure anything (song or device) is now suddenly screwed because Microsoft has a new strategy: Zobe.
Even worse, PlaidForSure music can't necessarily be burned to a CD for easy reuse. It depends on how greedy the PFS merchant was when they sold it. So your entire "thinking long term" premise has vanished. It's like investing in OS/2 or any of the other ideas Microsoft has abandoned after they didn't pay off immediately. As far as long term thinking goes, have you invested in WinCE devices over the past decade? Various vaporware efforts to kill QuickTime, Java, the web, open anything?
Clearly Apple isn't interested in licensing its own FairPlay, after the failure of Motorola's iTunes phone and Microsoft's own PFS burnout. But arguing that FairPlay is some tight lock-in is rather ridiculous. If you could push a button and dump all your Xbox games onto a CD that would then magically work on any other game console, would you be worried about vendor lock-in on Xbox games?
Oh wait, you're not worried about vendor lock in on any Microsoft platform, just in the idea of spewing insane FUD about problems that don't exist for Apple. There are valid things one can criticize about iTunes, but vendor lock-in of iTS music is the least legitimate by far.
The fantasy of iTunes lock in is rather weak. Anyone downloading iTS music is unlikely to be freaked out by some hypothetical loss in quality from buring to a CD and reimporting it. It wasn't high end audiophile stuff to begin with, so anyone who could hear the difference woundn't be experiencing the problem.
Vendor lock in is not Apple's plan, its the fantasy of people trying to vilify Apple for selling a good product. There is minimal profits with selling RIAA music, since Apple only gets a few cents anyway. The real money is going to the RIAA, or in the case of iTS indies like CDBaby, the artists. The value Apple adds is the service and convenience, and that makes its overall system of iTunes and the iPod more attractive. That's why iTunes doesn't work with other music players, and that's where Apple makes its money: the iPod hardware.
Microsoft thought the money was in downloads, so it set up PlaysForSure to inject itself into stores and players to make tax money on every song moving around. Unfortunately for them, there was no volume of songs being sold. The new Zube is hoping to make money on hardware sales, but because its priced to compete with the iPod, its not making any money either. And subscriptions aren't going to result in anything either - Microsoft bet the farm on music rentals, and consumers are clearly even less interested in signing up for music rentals that they are about buying tracks online.
No amount of analysis studing the buying habits of 7000 people, less than half of whom even use the iTS, will tell you much about how well the iTunes store is doing. Apple's own numbers make it clear that everyone with an iPod isn't buying music. In fact only a minority are both willing and able, since the store doesn't sell music worldwide.
Apple is building a platform based on hardware profits, the same thing it has always done. Microsoft is trying to tax a system with licensing fees. The difference is that in this arena, Microsoft doesn't have cheaper, higher volume hardware sales to ride. It's trying to ride a minority of the market: a fraction of the installed base, made up of less profitable hardware. It has further splintered its efforts by breaking the Zube off from PlayedForSure.
The other missing component between the PC business and the music player business is that music players don't need specialized software, they can run the same music users already have. So Microsoft is also lacking an equivalent to Office to sell its music customers. This is not another Windows.
No that's the point of options: Microsoft provides an option of getting it or not. Sony doesn't.
Sony wants to force adoption of Bluray, and if it can make everyone who buys a PS3 a Bluray customer, that will help.
Microsoft's unbundling of the HD-DVD gives gamers uninterested in HD a discount, but that also means that HD-DVD won't be as widely available, making it less attractive for studios to release their movies for. It's the same problem Microsoft has with the hard drive option: the low end base model of the 360 lacks a hard drive, meaning that users will have to buy one in order to use the Live online movie service. Since many users will opt for cheaper, Microsoft is cutting down its potential audience for online movie sales, making it less likely that Microsoft will keep it going. It may end up ditching it like it abandonded PlaysForSure, screwing both partners and customers who bought into it, including many stupid libarians who made sure all their crap was locked up in PlaysForSure DRM.
Of course, with the $200 Microsoft HD-DVD, the 360 is the exact same price as the PS3. Microsoft just allows you to not buy HD optical player as an option, so its not really less expensive at all, its just offered in a cheaper configuration.
I agree that Sony acted irresponsibly in installing DRM software scandalously as it did. But the Sony Windows Rootkit was enabled by Microsoft, who shipped a product that happily installed the covert software for users without them even knowing.
So if the rootkit incident taints Sony forever, buying new products from Microsoft isn't exactly assuming some high moral ground. Microsoft's answer to Sony's "problem" (the rational behind the rootkit) was provided by PlaysForSure, a similarly twisted and evil system that is similarly built into the system and denies users' rights. Combined with the general security design flaws of Windows, Micosoft is no better than Sony on the DRM front or the "gives a crap about users" front.
You're better off buying the system you like to play, because whatever system you buy is going to be playing you, whether you realize it or not.
If you look at any of the comments made by the "accused," its pretty obvous they were introduced to Digg by my site, because I used Digg's own promotional tags to encourage people to check Digg out. A handfull of people who read my site, but were not Digg users, chose to log into Digg when they saw I posted a new article, but otherwise didn't sit on Digg.
Anyone who has a website that has been on Digg knows that 1000 diggs = about 40,000 unique visits. That suggests only 1 in about 40 people Digg an article they visit. It's also obvious from comments that a large number of people digging and commenting on articles have not read the cited article, so that difference between Diggs and Visitors is even higher. Of course, as Digg users blog about articles they see on digg that are worthy of mention, other people who do not use Digg see the article, contributing to the difference.
Even if somebody set up a Digg bot collection of 50 automatic Diggs, it wouldn't result in articles that are highly rated by actual people commenting on the story. My articles not only were on the front page, but where rated highly apart from the 5 voices that sounded suspiciously like the single critic who was making such a stink about "spam" as he send out rapidfire hate mail and set up anonymous blogs about a ridiculous crisis befalling Digg because of the attention I was getting.
When some idiot makes wild claims against someone, it's time to apply a bit of critical thought to the matter to determine if the person is making a credible claim, or simply blowing hot air about nothing. He never criticized any facts I presented, it was all a smokescreen about "gaming," which he had earlier been banned for doing himself. He's also great at gettting publicity for his non-issues and personal attacks.
I guess some find such crap more entertaining than dealing with issues that matter. I find it somewhat frustrating to be working hard to write about ideas that a lot of people enjoy reading and talking about, whether they agree or not, and have it all attacked anonymously by a troll with zero credibility, with flaccid and hypocritical claims that don't matter.
That one attack keeps getting brought up again and again by people as if it is some real credible problem that I need to "address." So yeah, I am somewhat sensitive that you find anonymous bullshit more fasinating to talk about that work I researched and tried to present in an interesting and useful way -- at no profit to myself, other than being able to present a point of view that is seldom heard.
It's like developing for Linux and having SCO's claims brought up every half hour by the same two trolls who ask "Legitimate? Compelling evidence suggests it isn't! Better buy a license, or even safer, stick with Windows!!"
---
Apple iPhone Rumors Off the Hook Mere rumors of the iPhone have set Apple's stock at an all time high, doing more for Apple than the Zune has for Microsoft! Apple's silence leaves the iPhone-curious stuck with the writings of pundits, many of whom are bitter that Apple has repeatedly proven them wrong. CNET's Michael Kanellos, for example.
So you are going to try me based on the "compelling evidence" of accusations scribbled in an anonymous blog, which have been repeateded in several places but never corroborated by other sources?
I plead not guilty. I haven't set up any of the accounts in his McCarthy witchhunt.
If you were a Digg user, or if you review the comments on articles submitted, you'd know that many people accused of being sybils on his list replied with "WTF? I'm just a user" You'd also know that "lackawack," or Mike Caddick, who singlehandedly mounted the personal attacks on me and my site, has no credibility. He constantly posts hateful stuff that is fact free and inflammatory.
I offered to give him space on my site to refute any errors he thought I had presented, but he refused. He has no problems with facts, he's all about faceless, anonymous name calling using fake alises. And his wild accusations are apparently convincing to people who want to believe conspircay theories that make little sense.
Digg is so full of spam that you'd have to pay attention to remember even seeing my regular articles, which were on the front page a lot. The only "gaming of Digg" was zybch Mike Caddick's campaign to "burn all the books" (his phrase) from RDM on Digg.
And quite obviously, if I were creating 50 fake accounts to drive up my articles, all Caddick would need to do is report the list to Digg and they'd all be banned, because Digg can tell who is creating accounts from where, even if they do not use this information unless somebody complains. I can assure you that Caddick was complaining about me.
He has written me scads of hate mail gibberish that makes no sense, writes to random blogs and sites trying to get them to publish his screed. Most hypocritically, he himself was originally banned from Digg for promising -- in a digg posting that's still up -- to sign up a bunch of fake accounts and bury every article ever posted from RDM, and also promised to call upon a "vigalante" newsgroup to help. He has since made good on his claim, burying enough old articles so that Digg banned any submissions from my site.
I don't want anything to do with Digg, nor anyone who would rather roll in those rather obvious bullshit.
Your accusing me of "cheating" without even looking at the facts involved. Interestingly, all of the baseless bullshit anonymous blog entries he submits get an unreasonable amount of support - apparently he's an expert at gaming various sites; I'm not. I just write.
And clearly, people who use sites like digg are gullable enough to believe everything that shows up in a headline, despite the fact that most of the articles on Digg are written-for-digg by adclick websites, positioned by astroturfers, or simply wildly inacurate. So if you'd rather bathe in that than read my site, I sure can't stop you.
Written text conveys much less information that the same text, being read.
When you see words on a page, you invent your own thoughts as to how they were intended. When an actor reads lines from Shakespere, it's his or her job to put meaning into them, reflecting the intent and context in which those words were intended.
Any idiot can read classical literature and miss 90% of the meaning, just as any office worker can fire out an email that comes across wrong, or any blogger can type out a brain dump that readers misinterpret.
The best example is your own misunderstanding of what was written in the artlcle. Except I think your "misunderstanding" was intentional.
Preannouncements can ding current sales, but the Osborne Effect article you linked to in Wikipedia actually shows the opposite: that the OE is mostly a myth, and that plenty of examples prove that it is more often wrong than a reliable law of marketing.
I actually wrote about the Osborne Effect back when the Register was announcing how Intel Macs would kill Apple's sales before it could ever deliver them.
I also added notes from the article I wrote into that Wikipedia article, but they were removed to make it look like the Register itself dispelled the myth, rather than creating it.
The notes are in the Wiki history of the page you linked.
I appreciate feedback from readers, but it's more useful when its about actual ideas, not numerology.
Seriously, you sound like somebody watching the Daily Show saying, OMG, I know that Jon Stewart is going to make some comment about Bush... THERE, THERE IT IS!!!
As for Digg: it exists to tell weak-minded people what they already think they know. More than 80% of it is now PR fluff and other inoffensive written-for-digg articles that say nothing, and are commented on by people like yourself, who add nothing to the conversation apart from hypocrisy, impune bad motives without any proof, and generally suck.
So go roll in Digg and leave the bits of the web that are not yet as stupid alone.
Microsoft uses DirectX to tie game development to Windows and the Xbox. That presents a significant weakness for an Apple assault into serious PC gaming, on the level of Microsoft trying to displace the iPod with the Zune. Microsoft can spend billions for years and may still end up no better luck than five years of Janus/PlaysForSure.
Apple's best bet may be to target competition with the Wii - leave Sony and Microsoft to fight over $500-700 game consoles (they are both the same price with HD optical media playback), and join Nintendo in trying to sell $200-300 simpler games to a wider audience.
The Wii targets physical gameplay and retro sales of earlier games. Apple already has the gameplan down for selling music, TV, and movies, in addition to free podcasting, and recently, online game sales for the iPod. The iTV is an iPod cousin that uses an HDMI TV instead of a 2.5" screen, plays the same content, works from the same iTunes media libarary. It also is tied into iPhoto and home movies with iMovie.
Future consoles aren't going to be 2006, they're going to be a lot broader. Apple has a lot of elements in place to deliver, and its own retail stores to hawk them.
I got some criticism for writing in How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works that I thought Apple's new iTV was going to incorporate 802.11n, the new and much faster industry standard for wireless networking. Some readers thought that n isn't going to be ready in the timeframe Apple announced for iTV's arrival, while others said 802.11g is plenty fast enough to stream video already.
N: Ready and Willing
Wireless n is most certainly is going to be ready however. Even if the IEEE doesn't get around to filing their papers on the standard, Apple has compelling reasons to deliver n for the iTV, as well as pre-n competition. Belkin, D-link, Linksys, Netgear and others have shipped pre-n gear since 2004, so the technology isn't just some far off, futuristic and undeliverable crazy talk.
Remember too that Apple introduced Airport Extreme in January of 2003, prior to the official ratification of its underlying 802.11g, which didn't happen until six months later in July. Since final approval of 802.11n is due in July 2007, it won't be a stretch at all for Apple to deliver n in the first quarter of next year. The real problem for existing vendors is that the various pre-n non-standard implementations aren't compatible with each other, and that that there hasn't yet been a killer app for n.
Apple is currently making fat profits, is expanding, and has huge potential to further expand into new markets.
Microsoft growth has stalled, and all of its new efforts to expand outside of servers/windows/office have been commercial failures. All. Now its 3 monopoly positions are under attack from Linux and open source: Linux in the Enterprise, OpenOffice and Ajax web apps like Google's, and Linux and alternatives on the desktop. That makes Microsoft a have-not.
Apple is much smaller, but the company is growing as fast as it can. Its retail stores are going gangbuster, its Mac sales are increasing dramatically, its iPod sales have been off the hook and are not even phased by competition, and its software portfolio is growing dramatically and well received. Apple is even getting noticed in the Enterprise, where even mentioning Apple has previously been taken as nothing short of heresy. Apple is a have.
Right - there are incredible contributions made by academia. There is also a huge amount of research and development directly financed by the US government, which is also not profit based. In the projects I was involved in at an academic environment (San Francisco General Hospital is primarily staffed by the University of California, San Francisco), about half were government funded; another half were funded by indepenant groups, including pharmaceutical companies.
Where does academia get its money? Outside of the government money invested in the general health of the population, it comes from corporate interests who sponsor technology research for future potential of profits.
Without a profit incentive, leading research wouldn't be considered. The government can't afford to finance ideas that aren't likely to result in immediate cures. Government research is very conservative in its approach, while the "big drug companies" are prepared to risk more in order to deliver the potential for profits.
Things are messed up in a lot of areas, but without drug patents, drug companies wouldn't, for example, invest money to develop solutions for problems that only affect a small minority of the population.
We already have drugs today that have gone generic, and since they lack any profit potential, are left unresearched. These drugs have other applications, some of which are known, but since the FDA requires extensive and very expensive clinical trials to prove the effacacy and safely of any drug, nobody is doing anything about it.
Without FDA rules, anyone could release potentially devistating drugs without any accounting for their liablility.
That's how software works today: it's wholly unregulated, so anyone can release anything and claim it works, even if it doesn't. Imagine if your dad's heart medication worked as well as Windows, or required as much expertise to take as Linux, or if you needed to buy a new version every two years like Mac OS X!
The only open-source style development creating drugs today are the people breeding new strains of marijuana. Illegal drugs have their own profit motive.
After my bike wrecks, I was taking Flexeril, a muscle relaxant that knocked me out and kept me from working while I recovered. Then I discovered a new drug called Skelaxin, which not only worked, but didn't disrupt my life. It cost something like $80/bottle, so without insurance, I would have been laying around in a flexeril coma instead of rapidly recovering and being able to do things.
So I'm a bit of a fan of expensive drug research willing to do the work to find a $4 pill to sell at a profit. Soviet-style state sponsored health research wouldn't likely see that as a priority.
Lackawack, your links don't support the claims you make.
Windows 5x More Expensive than Mac OS X presents an accurate and fair history of the deliverables of Apple and Microsoft from 2001-2006. The only thing you didn't like about it was that it refuted the wild claim by Paul Thurrott that Mac OS X "costs users something like $750." I presented that not only does Microsoft charge more for retail copies and upgrades of Windows, but that Apple has released five times as many major updates and over fifteen times as many minor updates to Mac OS X since 2000.
I also presented why Windows costs users five times as much to keep up to date, by figuring in the costs professional users spend on security and adware problems, and detailed what those figures were for readers to consider. That raised complaints from a few Digg users, so I presented a followup article defending the claims using sources that included Consumer Reports and data from Garner Group. I also published letters and comments from readers with views from both sides.
The less rabid ones told me I had undershot the real cost of Windows, while the typical Windows enthusiast noise was pretty much unreadable gibberish.
So no, you are wrong, and a liar. That's why you have to post as an anonymous coward. That's also why I don't read your hate mail anymore, because you have nothing interesting to say apart from how you are going to "ruin my career." I don't write as a profession, I do it for fun and to provide an alternative view on some of the worst FUD out there.
I don't really know where you were going with the article Why Apple Bounced Back, because there is simply nothing to attack, apart from artwork portraying Steve Jobs as FroZone.
Nothing screams legitimacy like some random googlepages screed in all caps.
You should have pointed to your Digg posting, similarly burried, which ranted about my "GAMING DIGG!!!! PROOF!!!" or the handful of snotty comments you post on digg because I criticized Microsoft's business strategies and marketing of the Zune.
Perhaps you need to find something more useful to do with your life than anonymously hang on my coattails, Lackawack2. You're not that fun to hang out with and you have nothing interesting to say.
That's a better definition for "spam" than some RDM articles you find threatening to your world view or the companies you idolize.
Nobody forces you to agree, so why do you try so hard to censor ideas you don't like? Do you hate freedom?
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that you can't push a button on your PC and dump out a plain, unencumbered disk containing Windows that you can then use on your replacement PC, or to reinstall on your PC after you do a significant upgrade, etc. You have to call India and ask for permission to use your copy of Windows.
With iTunes, there is a barrier to prevent wholesale, effortless dumping of paid music into Napster style sharing bin, but there is little real barrier to using your music in your car CD changer, or getting it on a Sansa, an Xbox, or wherever else you might want it: you burn a CD.
Of course, you knew that.
The Danger of DRM
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
The Register's Collapsing iTunes Store Myth
Anonymous coward,
No, there is a choice. The iPod requires no DRM. The use of DRM FairPlay content from the iTunes Store is entirely up to the consumer, who can choose to use their own MP3s, buy CDs and rip, or even just use iTunes to access free Podcast content through iTunes and other sources.
There are no features on the iPod that demand DRM. Zero.
Microsoft's PlaysForSure and the competing Zune are based on DRM. The centerpiece of PFS is subscription music, which requires complex DRM on the player. The iPod intentionally *can't* delete your content or prevent you from listening to it past the end of the month. The highly touted feature of Zune is wireless sharing, which is similarly encrusted with DRM restrictions. Even if the device does not re-encode the files, it does quarantine them to prevent second hand sharing and terminates them before others can use them. It's DRM.
So you are lying: Microsoft is not at all forthcoming about DRM, it's lying and hiding its unfair DRM manifesto. Windows and Office are now both crippled by invasive and draconian DRM "activation" that is unfair and abusive, as is their Janus / WMA media player technology and products based upon it. Microsoft invented Palladium, remember?
WMA and WGA are abusive DRM for your media and OS: unreasonably stacked in the vendor's favor, subject to change unilaterally, and priced by a monopoly power, not the market.
For you to ignore all that and turn around and try to vilify the iPod--which provides the least offensive DRM system as an optional side dish--makes it clear who the "fanboi" really is.
The Danger of DRM
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
The Register's Collapsing iTunes Store Myth
In the same sense that a militarized police state is great unless you're a terrorist or a critic of the government. The two "seem" to go together.
WGA is abusive DRM for your OS: unreasonably stacked in the vendor's favor, subject to change unilaterally, and priced by a monopoly power, not the market.
--
The Danger of DRM
Microsoft is just a company, but the actions it takes and policies it has set reflect the personalities of its leaders. Over the last three decades, Microsoft has used its position to do very little. It has not ushered in new technology, but rather remained on top by blocking superior competition using fradulent business practices.
.. And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success; I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success, in the most part; I have a problem with the fact they make really third rate products." -- Steve Jobs, in 'Triumph of the Nerds'
Examples:
In 1981, Microsoft said it would deliver the same graphical UI that Apple, Amiga, Atari and others were working on. Everyone else delivered in the mid 80s except for Microsoft, which couldn't release a product anyone wanted to buy until Windows 3.0 in 1990. It was still crap. Windows 95, a full decade late, was derivative and unoriginal, certaily not anything new.
1990s
Cairo, in 1991, promised to deliver ideas beyond those offered by NeXT, Apple, IBM, and Novell... but never did. Those companies all released technologies Microsoft planned, before Microsoft did - a half decade or more before, in an industry where a year is forever.
Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
In addition to Cairo as an operating system, Microsoft did the EXACT same thing with Quicktime and the PenPoint and Newton handhelds: annonce a lot, deliver ten years late, if at all.
Microsoft also worked to kill every open standard that threatened its Windows monopoly, including the Java VM and the web browser. Once the threat was terminated, development slowed to a crawl. Today they are working against PDF, OpenGL, JPEG, and MP3, hoping to install and maintain their own proprietary standards.
2000s
Cairo was repeated as Longhorn, delayed for years, then stripped of any interesting features and dumped out many years late in Vista, which is highly derivative of Mac OS X.
Where is this company's contributions: Clippy? Yes, Microsoft has worked on some interesting things and does have products that work. They're just decades late and have sat on top of better products from other companies who delivered the same technology much earlier. A company with as much clout and resources as Microsoft has some accountability to actualy deliver and lead. It hasn't.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste; they have absolutely no taste. And what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way - in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products
Microsoft is good a making announcements, the real problem is in delivering products they've promised.
"Microsoft introduced a new product vision called Cairo in 1991; it ended up disrupting development and marginalizing competition throughout the next decade. The tactic worked so well that Microsoft repeated it in the following decade as Longhorn. Here's how it happened, and why Microsoft won't be able to repeat the same fraud again."
Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
The real point is that the hypothetical problem you're trying to invent does not exist.
Nobody is buying GBs of iTunes tracks without the understanding that they are designed to optimally play on the iPod. FairPlay songs are ~4 MB. To even have 40 GBs of FairPlay music, you'd need to buy around $10,000 of iTunes songs. Who the fuck has done that? It's bullshit pushed by people like you, or Napster, who famounsly insisted in its advertising that filling up an iPod cost $10,000. Clearly, you are both full of shit.
For somebody who has bought a few albums and decides they really want a Sansa player, the option exists to burn CDs. The majority of iPod users don't need to buy anything - all their CDs just work, and they can continue to buy CDs, using iTS to buy one off tracks when convenient. And they are not interested in other players, for the same reason the market in general is not interested in them: they are nearly all crap.
For somebody investing in PlayedForSure, say Napster, the songs they bought are not transferable to any other player, including the Zoops, a fact you skirted in your intent to repeat Microsoft's "talking points." If you're really fooled by the illusion that Microsoft hasn't really and truely abandonded PFS, then why do you suposed that Peter Sealey, a professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, described Microsoft's PlayedForSure move in the words: "I've never seen a business so blatantly screw its business partners."
Apple iPhone Rumors Off the Hook
SEE ALSO:
-recidivism
-parole
-probation
Bill Gates for President? No Thanks.
Have you been in a cave?
Anyone buying a PlaysForSure anything (song or device) is now suddenly screwed because Microsoft has a new strategy: Zobe.
Even worse, PlaidForSure music can't necessarily be burned to a CD for easy reuse. It depends on how greedy the PFS merchant was when they sold it. So your entire "thinking long term" premise has vanished. It's like investing in OS/2 or any of the other ideas Microsoft has abandoned after they didn't pay off immediately. As far as long term thinking goes, have you invested in WinCE devices over the past decade? Various vaporware efforts to kill QuickTime, Java, the web, open anything?
Clearly Apple isn't interested in licensing its own FairPlay, after the failure of Motorola's iTunes phone and Microsoft's own PFS burnout. But arguing that FairPlay is some tight lock-in is rather ridiculous. If you could push a button and dump all your Xbox games onto a CD that would then magically work on any other game console, would you be worried about vendor lock-in on Xbox games?
Oh wait, you're not worried about vendor lock in on any Microsoft platform, just in the idea of spewing insane FUD about problems that don't exist for Apple. There are valid things one can criticize about iTunes, but vendor lock-in of iTS music is the least legitimate by far.
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
Yeah using the iTunes Store it like using the currency of a country that uses anti-counterfeiting technologies.
I don't want my ability to duplicate my own money infringed upon.
Device Problems In Search of a Solution
The fantasy of iTunes lock in is rather weak. Anyone downloading iTS music is unlikely to be freaked out by some hypothetical loss in quality from buring to a CD and reimporting it. It wasn't high end audiophile stuff to begin with, so anyone who could hear the difference woundn't be experiencing the problem.
Vendor lock in is not Apple's plan, its the fantasy of people trying to vilify Apple for selling a good product. There is minimal profits with selling RIAA music, since Apple only gets a few cents anyway. The real money is going to the RIAA, or in the case of iTS indies like CDBaby, the artists. The value Apple adds is the service and convenience, and that makes its overall system of iTunes and the iPod more attractive. That's why iTunes doesn't work with other music players, and that's where Apple makes its money: the iPod hardware.
Microsoft thought the money was in downloads, so it set up PlaysForSure to inject itself into stores and players to make tax money on every song moving around. Unfortunately for them, there was no volume of songs being sold. The new Zube is hoping to make money on hardware sales, but because its priced to compete with the iPod, its not making any money either. And subscriptions aren't going to result in anything either - Microsoft bet the farm on music rentals, and consumers are clearly even less interested in signing up for music rentals that they are about buying tracks online.
No amount of analysis studing the buying habits of 7000 people, less than half of whom even use the iTS, will tell you much about how well the iTunes store is doing. Apple's own numbers make it clear that everyone with an iPod isn't buying music. In fact only a minority are both willing and able, since the store doesn't sell music worldwide.
Apple is building a platform based on hardware profits, the same thing it has always done. Microsoft is trying to tax a system with licensing fees. The difference is that in this arena, Microsoft doesn't have cheaper, higher volume hardware sales to ride. It's trying to ride a minority of the market: a fraction of the installed base, made up of less profitable hardware. It has further splintered its efforts by breaking the Zube off from PlayedForSure.
The other missing component between the PC business and the music player business is that music players don't need specialized software, they can run the same music users already have. So Microsoft is also lacking an equivalent to Office to sell its music customers. This is not another Windows.
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
Newton Lessons for Apple's New Platform
No that's the point of options: Microsoft provides an option of getting it or not. Sony doesn't.
Sony wants to force adoption of Bluray, and if it can make everyone who buys a PS3 a Bluray customer, that will help.
Microsoft's unbundling of the HD-DVD gives gamers uninterested in HD a discount, but that also means that HD-DVD won't be as widely available, making it less attractive for studios to release their movies for. It's the same problem Microsoft has with the hard drive option: the low end base model of the 360 lacks a hard drive, meaning that users will have to buy one in order to use the Live online movie service. Since many users will opt for cheaper, Microsoft is cutting down its potential audience for online movie sales, making it less likely that Microsoft will keep it going. It may end up ditching it like it abandonded PlaysForSure, screwing both partners and customers who bought into it, including many stupid libarians who made sure all their crap was locked up in PlaysForSure DRM.
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
Of course, with the $200 Microsoft HD-DVD, the 360 is the exact same price as the PS3. Microsoft just allows you to not buy HD optical player as an option, so its not really less expensive at all, its just offered in a cheaper configuration.
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
I agree that Sony acted irresponsibly in installing DRM software scandalously as it did. But the Sony Windows Rootkit was enabled by Microsoft, who shipped a product that happily installed the covert software for users without them even knowing.
So if the rootkit incident taints Sony forever, buying new products from Microsoft isn't exactly assuming some high moral ground. Microsoft's answer to Sony's "problem" (the rational behind the rootkit) was provided by PlaysForSure, a similarly twisted and evil system that is similarly built into the system and denies users' rights. Combined with the general security design flaws of Windows, Micosoft is no better than Sony on the DRM front or the "gives a crap about users" front.
You're better off buying the system you like to play, because whatever system you buy is going to be playing you, whether you realize it or not.
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
If you look at any of the comments made by the "accused," its pretty obvous they were introduced to Digg by my site, because I used Digg's own promotional tags to encourage people to check Digg out. A handfull of people who read my site, but were not Digg users, chose to log into Digg when they saw I posted a new article, but otherwise didn't sit on Digg.
Anyone who has a website that has been on Digg knows that 1000 diggs = about 40,000 unique visits. That suggests only 1 in about 40 people Digg an article they visit. It's also obvious from comments that a large number of people digging and commenting on articles have not read the cited article, so that difference between Diggs and Visitors is even higher. Of course, as Digg users blog about articles they see on digg that are worthy of mention, other people who do not use Digg see the article, contributing to the difference.
Even if somebody set up a Digg bot collection of 50 automatic Diggs, it wouldn't result in articles that are highly rated by actual people commenting on the story. My articles not only were on the front page, but where rated highly apart from the 5 voices that sounded suspiciously like the single critic who was making such a stink about "spam" as he send out rapidfire hate mail and set up anonymous blogs about a ridiculous crisis befalling Digg because of the attention I was getting.
When some idiot makes wild claims against someone, it's time to apply a bit of critical thought to the matter to determine if the person is making a credible claim, or simply blowing hot air about nothing. He never criticized any facts I presented, it was all a smokescreen about "gaming," which he had earlier been banned for doing himself. He's also great at gettting publicity for his non-issues and personal attacks.
I guess some find such crap more entertaining than dealing with issues that matter. I find it somewhat frustrating to be working hard to write about ideas that a lot of people enjoy reading and talking about, whether they agree or not, and have it all attacked anonymously by a troll with zero credibility, with flaccid and hypocritical claims that don't matter.
That one attack keeps getting brought up again and again by people as if it is some real credible problem that I need to "address." So yeah, I am somewhat sensitive that you find anonymous bullshit more fasinating to talk about that work I researched and tried to present in an interesting and useful way -- at no profit to myself, other than being able to present a point of view that is seldom heard.
It's like developing for Linux and having SCO's claims brought up every half hour by the same two trolls who ask "Legitimate? Compelling evidence suggests it isn't! Better buy a license, or even safer, stick with Windows!!"
---
Apple iPhone Rumors Off the Hook
Mere rumors of the iPhone have set Apple's stock at an all time high, doing more for Apple than the Zune has for Microsoft! Apple's silence leaves the iPhone-curious stuck with the writings of pundits, many of whom are bitter that Apple has repeatedly proven them wrong. CNET's Michael Kanellos, for example.
So you are going to try me based on the "compelling evidence" of accusations scribbled in an anonymous blog, which have been repeateded in several places but never corroborated by other sources?
I plead not guilty. I haven't set up any of the accounts in his McCarthy witchhunt.
If you were a Digg user, or if you review the comments on articles submitted, you'd know that many people accused of being sybils on his list replied with "WTF? I'm just a user" You'd also know that "lackawack," or Mike Caddick, who singlehandedly mounted the personal attacks on me and my site, has no credibility. He constantly posts hateful stuff that is fact free and inflammatory.
I offered to give him space on my site to refute any errors he thought I had presented, but he refused. He has no problems with facts, he's all about faceless, anonymous name calling using fake alises. And his wild accusations are apparently convincing to people who want to believe conspircay theories that make little sense.
Digg is so full of spam that you'd have to pay attention to remember even seeing my regular articles, which were on the front page a lot. The only "gaming of Digg" was zybch Mike Caddick's campaign to "burn all the books" (his phrase) from RDM on Digg.
And quite obviously, if I were creating 50 fake accounts to drive up my articles, all Caddick would need to do is report the list to Digg and they'd all be banned, because Digg can tell who is creating accounts from where, even if they do not use this information unless somebody complains. I can assure you that Caddick was complaining about me.
He has written me scads of hate mail gibberish that makes no sense, writes to random blogs and sites trying to get them to publish his screed. Most hypocritically, he himself was originally banned from Digg for promising -- in a digg posting that's still up -- to sign up a bunch of fake accounts and bury every article ever posted from RDM, and also promised to call upon a "vigalante" newsgroup to help. He has since made good on his claim, burying enough old articles so that Digg banned any submissions from my site.
I don't want anything to do with Digg, nor anyone who would rather roll in those rather obvious bullshit.
Your accusing me of "cheating" without even looking at the facts involved. Interestingly, all of the baseless bullshit anonymous blog entries he submits get an unreasonable amount of support - apparently he's an expert at gaming various sites; I'm not. I just write.
And clearly, people who use sites like digg are gullable enough to believe everything that shows up in a headline, despite the fact that most of the articles on Digg are written-for-digg by adclick websites, positioned by astroturfers, or simply wildly inacurate. So if you'd rather bathe in that than read my site, I sure can't stop you.
Written text conveys much less information that the same text, being read.
When you see words on a page, you invent your own thoughts as to how they were intended. When an actor reads lines from Shakespere, it's his or her job to put meaning into them, reflecting the intent and context in which those words were intended.
Any idiot can read classical literature and miss 90% of the meaning, just as any office worker can fire out an email that comes across wrong, or any blogger can type out a brain dump that readers misinterpret.
The best example is your own misunderstanding of what was written in the artlcle. Except I think your "misunderstanding" was intentional.
Preannouncements can ding current sales, but the Osborne Effect article you linked to in Wikipedia actually shows the opposite: that the OE is mostly a myth, and that plenty of examples prove that it is more often wrong than a reliable law of marketing.
I actually wrote about the Osborne Effect back when the Register was announcing how Intel Macs would kill Apple's sales before it could ever deliver them.
Why Apple won't suffer the Osborne Effect
I also added notes from the article I wrote into that Wikipedia article, but they were removed to make it look like the Register itself dispelled the myth, rather than creating it.
The notes are in the Wiki history of the page you linked.
The world doesn't want the truth.
I appreciate feedback from readers, but it's more useful when its about actual ideas, not numerology.
Seriously, you sound like somebody watching the Daily Show saying, OMG, I know that Jon Stewart is going to make some comment about Bush... THERE, THERE IT IS!!!
As for Digg: it exists to tell weak-minded people what they already think they know. More than 80% of it is now PR fluff and other inoffensive written-for-digg articles that say nothing, and are commented on by people like yourself, who add nothing to the conversation apart from hypocrisy, impune bad motives without any proof, and generally suck.
So go roll in Digg and leave the bits of the web that are not yet as stupid alone.
Nope, that was a fake comment posted by a reader in the same area as your followup comment taking offense:
[this was a fraud posting purporting to be from the site author but actually made by 81.169.180.248]
If it doesn't sound like Daniel Eran, it probably isn't Daniel Eran.
Microsoft uses DirectX to tie game development to Windows and the Xbox. That presents a significant weakness for an Apple assault into serious PC gaming, on the level of Microsoft trying to displace the iPod with the Zune. Microsoft can spend billions for years and may still end up no better luck than five years of Janus/PlaysForSure.
Apple's best bet may be to target competition with the Wii - leave Sony and Microsoft to fight over $500-700 game consoles (they are both the same price with HD optical media playback), and join Nintendo in trying to sell $200-300 simpler games to a wider audience.
The Wii targets physical gameplay and retro sales of earlier games. Apple already has the gameplan down for selling music, TV, and movies, in addition to free podcasting, and recently, online game sales for the iPod. The iTV is an iPod cousin that uses an HDMI TV instead of a 2.5" screen, plays the same content, works from the same iTunes media libarary. It also is tied into iPhoto and home movies with iMovie.
Future consoles aren't going to be 2006, they're going to be a lot broader. Apple has a lot of elements in place to deliver, and its own retail stores to hawk them.
Why Apple Will Change TV
From RoughlyDrafted:
I got some criticism for writing in How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works that I thought Apple's new iTV was going to incorporate 802.11n, the new and much faster industry standard for wireless networking. Some readers thought that n isn't going to be ready in the timeframe Apple announced for iTV's arrival, while others said 802.11g is plenty fast enough to stream video already.
N: Ready and Willing
Wireless n is most certainly is going to be ready however. Even if the IEEE doesn't get around to filing their papers on the standard, Apple has compelling reasons to deliver n for the iTV, as well as pre-n competition. Belkin, D-link, Linksys, Netgear and others have shipped pre-n gear since 2004, so the technology isn't just some far off, futuristic and undeliverable crazy talk.
Remember too that Apple introduced Airport Extreme in January of 2003, prior to the official ratification of its underlying 802.11g, which didn't happen until six months later in July. Since final approval of 802.11n is due in July 2007, it won't be a stretch at all for Apple to deliver n in the first quarter of next year. The real problem for existing vendors is that the various pre-n non-standard implementations aren't compatible with each other, and that that there hasn't yet been a killer app for n.
iTV: the Killer App for Wireless N
How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works
Apple is currently making fat profits, is expanding, and has huge potential to further expand into new markets.
Microsoft growth has stalled, and all of its new efforts to expand outside of servers/windows/office have been commercial failures. All. Now its 3 monopoly positions are under attack from Linux and open source: Linux in the Enterprise, OpenOffice and Ajax web apps like Google's, and Linux and alternatives on the desktop. That makes Microsoft a have-not.
Apple is much smaller, but the company is growing as fast as it can. Its retail stores are going gangbuster, its Mac sales are increasing dramatically, its iPod sales have been off the hook and are not even phased by competition, and its software portfolio is growing dramatically and well received. Apple is even getting noticed in the Enterprise, where even mentioning Apple has previously been taken as nothing short of heresy. Apple is a have.
Right - there are incredible contributions made by academia. There is also a huge amount of research and development directly financed by the US government, which is also not profit based. In the projects I was involved in at an academic environment (San Francisco General Hospital is primarily staffed by the University of California, San Francisco), about half were government funded; another half were funded by indepenant groups, including pharmaceutical companies.
Where does academia get its money? Outside of the government money invested in the general health of the population, it comes from corporate interests who sponsor technology research for future potential of profits.
Without a profit incentive, leading research wouldn't be considered. The government can't afford to finance ideas that aren't likely to result in immediate cures. Government research is very conservative in its approach, while the "big drug companies" are prepared to risk more in order to deliver the potential for profits.
Things are messed up in a lot of areas, but without drug patents, drug companies wouldn't, for example, invest money to develop solutions for problems that only affect a small minority of the population.
We already have drugs today that have gone generic, and since they lack any profit potential, are left unresearched. These drugs have other applications, some of which are known, but since the FDA requires extensive and very expensive clinical trials to prove the effacacy and safely of any drug, nobody is doing anything about it.
Without FDA rules, anyone could release potentially devistating drugs without any accounting for their liablility.
That's how software works today: it's wholly unregulated, so anyone can release anything and claim it works, even if it doesn't. Imagine if your dad's heart medication worked as well as Windows, or required as much expertise to take as Linux, or if you needed to buy a new version every two years like Mac OS X!
The only open-source style development creating drugs today are the people breeding new strains of marijuana. Illegal drugs have their own profit motive.
After my bike wrecks, I was taking Flexeril, a muscle relaxant that knocked me out and kept me from working while I recovered. Then I discovered a new drug called Skelaxin, which not only worked, but didn't disrupt my life. It cost something like $80/bottle, so without insurance, I would have been laying around in a flexeril coma instead of rapidly recovering and being able to do things.
So I'm a bit of a fan of expensive drug research willing to do the work to find a $4 pill to sell at a profit. Soviet-style state sponsored health research wouldn't likely see that as a priority.
--
iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
Lackawack, your links don't support the claims you make.
Windows 5x More Expensive than Mac OS X presents an accurate and fair history of the deliverables of Apple and Microsoft from 2001-2006. The only thing you didn't like about it was that it refuted the wild claim by Paul Thurrott that Mac OS X "costs users something like $750." I presented that not only does Microsoft charge more for retail copies and upgrades of Windows, but that Apple has released five times as many major updates and over fifteen times as many minor updates to Mac OS X since 2000.
I also presented why Windows costs users five times as much to keep up to date, by figuring in the costs professional users spend on security and adware problems, and detailed what those figures were for readers to consider. That raised complaints from a few Digg users, so I presented a followup article defending the claims using sources that included Consumer Reports and data from Garner Group. I also published letters and comments from readers with views from both sides.
The less rabid ones told me I had undershot the real cost of Windows, while the typical Windows enthusiast noise was pretty much unreadable gibberish.
So no, you are wrong, and a liar. That's why you have to post as an anonymous coward. That's also why I don't read your hate mail anymore, because you have nothing interesting to say apart from how you are going to "ruin my career." I don't write as a profession, I do it for fun and to provide an alternative view on some of the worst FUD out there.
I don't really know where you were going with the article Why Apple Bounced Back, because there is simply nothing to attack, apart from artwork portraying Steve Jobs as FroZone.
Nothing screams legitimacy like some random googlepages screed in all caps.
You should have pointed to your Digg posting, similarly burried, which ranted about my "GAMING DIGG!!!! PROOF!!!" or the handful of snotty comments you post on digg because I criticized Microsoft's business strategies and marketing of the Zune.
Perhaps you need to find something more useful to do with your life than anonymously hang on my coattails, Lackawack2. You're not that fun to hang out with and you have nothing interesting to say.
That's a better definition for "spam" than some RDM articles you find threatening to your world view or the companies you idolize.
Nobody forces you to agree, so why do you try so hard to censor ideas you don't like? Do you hate freedom?