In the interest of finding an alternative to the Microsoft overlord, we may be rushing headlong into a new, even more proprietary overlord. Its name?
Apple.
According to a recent poll that The Register ran with its readers, 55 percent crown Apple as the King of Closed, while only 21 percent awarded that dubious distinction to Microsoft. Twenty-four percent think they're equally bad.
While I'm a big Apple fan, and like using it as the foundation for a wide range of open-source software that I happily run on my Mac, I can sympathize with the sentiments of The Register's developer audience:
The most frequently cited reason for regarding Apple as closed was the end-to-end proprietary nature of its offerings, which tie hardware to software to services and in a way that is thought to restrict choice and interoperability. Whether it's OS X being wedded to the Mac, the iPod being dependent on the iTunes service, or iPhone software distribution being controlled via the Apple Store, there is a strong perception that openness is not always the biggest priority for Apple.
For developers in particular, this end-to-end proprietary approach appears to be a big turn-off, which is interesting given that one of the most frequently cited strengths of the Mac, for example, is the Unix foundation that underpins OS X, which is generally considered to be an indicator of openness and compliance with standards....In terms of specifics, references were made to lack of transparency with regard to proprietary API specifications, and being secretive about known faults, vulnerabilities, and so on - behaviour that Microsoft simply could not get away with nowadays without drawing fire from its customers or the regulator.
So, even as Microsoft seeks to find ways to open up, Apple is content to close off, figuring that its consumer crowd simply wants something that works, regardless of the consequences to ultimate computing freedom. This is, in fact, precisely how Microsoft started down its now well-worn path to closing off customer choice: tie products together to make them work well together, and often to the exclusion of third-party alternatives.
Will Apple become the next Microsoft? Time will tell. But its recent action toward open-source Songbird, which poses a threat (albeit a weak one) to iTunes, is no credit to an organization that bills itself as the cool alternative to stodgy Microsoft. Cool? Maybe. Alternative? Well, that would mean that it would have to be different.
Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk thinks that Apple's hiring of IBM chip-meister Mark Papermaster may suggest a shift in its digital music strategy. I think Van Buskirk may be right:
Want to run an advanced music service with robust streaming to iPhone descendants? You might want to have the guy behind some of the latest advances in server design on board.
At the other end of any sort of cloud-based music service are the microprocessor chips in laptops and portables. Apple paid $278 million for the chipmaker PA Semi earlier this year, and Papermaster...is a chip-design expert with 26 years of experience at IBM. In addition to helping Apple revamp its servers, Papermaster could help Apple design a server-to-microprocessor architecture to run a connected music service and other applications that call on the cloud.
The upside to this is ease-of-use for the consumer. The downside? Absolute Apple lock-in.
I noted recently that openness is a second-order consideration for buyers, but it may quickly become a first-order concern if Apple's service is so soup-to-nuts airtight - from cloud to desktop to mobile - that consumers, once in, can't get their music out. Apple has demonstrated its willingness to use extensive means to entrap customers (e.g., the alleged use of iTunes in new MacBook models to prevent jailbreaking iPhones).
Will this be any different?
You just bought a new MacBook Pro. You can't wait to pull it out of the box and sync it with your shiny new iPhone. Perhaps you travel abroad a lot, and you can't afford to pay AT&T's insane international roaming rates (Who can?). Or perhaps you have an application that Apple won't provide you through its App Store but that can be installed on a jailbroken phone.
If you have a new MacBook, you may be out of luck. If you have Windows, however, you should be fine. The irony is stifling.
Gizmodo is reporting that Apple has found a novel way to prevent the jailbreaking of its iPhones, one that no cracking of the iPhone firmware is going to fix. This time, Apple apparently is using a custom build of iTunes in the newest MacBook line to stymie attempts to jailbreak iPhones:
The new aluminum MacBooks...don't seem to be able to recognize an iPhone or iPod Touch when it is booted into DFU mode, a vital requirement for jailbreaking...Though the hardware is where one sees the most conspicuous changes in the new MacBook, this problem most likely stems from a subtle software modification. It's not clear what specifically changed, but a new build of iTunes, unique to the new MacBooks, seems like a likely culprit.
In this iPhone cat-and-mouse game, Apple seems to be turning to ever more ingenious methods to keep cash rolling in the door. Customers? Well, their best bet for circumventing Apple's wily ways is to jailbreak the iPhone using Windows-based iTunes.
How ironic (and sad) is that? The more we buy into Apple, the less freedom. Sounds like Microsoft, doesn't it? This time, however, it's worse, because Apple also controls the hardware.
The Wall Street Journal's "Mossberg Solution" yesterday looked into two new music discovery services from Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune. The verdict went Microsoft's way, but the real winner in the services will be the music industry.
What should have been blindingly obvious before, what with Pandora, Last.fm, and other music discovery services helping consumers find music to love, was that the future of the music industry is discovery. Now that Apple has made it easy to purchase music, the next step for making a big industry even bigger is to help consumers find new products to consume.
The old model--expensive promotions through brick-and-mortar retailers and radio play--is giving way to instant gratification online, and I'm willing to bet that it's going to pay huge dividends.
As just one example, yesterday I upgraded my iTunes to version 8, which provided me with Apple's new Genius music discovery service. A day later, I've already bought an additional $15 worth of music--including songs from The Pixies, The Decemberists, and others.
iTunes' "Genius" in music discovery
(Credit: Matt Asay)Now that Universal and other music titans have discovered that digital downloads can pay off in industry growth, it's time to hypercharge that growth with efficient, online music discovery.
Ars Technica has the dirt on an admission from Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy: digital music downloads might not be evil, after all.
Just in case you don't know, Universal Music Group--one of the Big Four record labels--is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi. So this is a big deal.
As Ars Technica reports, Universal's music business is up 3 percent, halting a long-term slide toward oblivion:
Digital, of course, is the big driver of better economic performance. At Warner, for instance, it made up 20 percent of total revenues in the second quarter and generated 39 percent more income that it had a year before. Universal notes that its growth is fueled, in part, by "the momentum of digital sales growth."
Imagine that. Studies have shown that peer-to-peer downloaders tend to pay more for music, but I think the larger trend is that many of us simply want easy ways to consume digital goods and that forcing us into an offline purchase was a losing strategy.
Apple has made it easy to buy music online and has an 85 percent market share as thanks.
Clay Shirky, a new media professor at New York University, recently noted that the music industry is the "skull on a pikestaff as a warning to others about how not to deal with the Internet." Finally, however, things may be changing.
The music industry now needs to continue its experimentation with digital downloads, making it ever easier to discover and consume online media. That's the future.
(Credit:
Songbird)
I've kept an eye on Songbird for a year or so now. The project defines itself as "a complete desktop media player or 'jukebox' with a uniquely open approach to Internet digital media network services." I like to think of it as the music experience...open sourced.
InformationWeek's review of Songbird is dead on: enormous potential but still quite a few rough edges:
The idea seems to be to create something that has the same extensible, developer-friendly framework as Firefox, so that people can write plugins to add all different kinds of functionality to the core program....
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Tim O'Reilly writes a thoughtful piece on what we can learn from iTunes, returning to a familiar theme for him: the Internet-enabled address book and software above the level of a single device. The general point is that software should be architected to be Internet-aware and, one step further, should make useful connections between different, disparate applications/data sources.
It's more than a programming language designed to run on a wide range of operating systems and hardware platforms. That was Java. This is now.
In the Internet age, we really shouldn't be limited by silly things like software monopolies, not when the world has given way to a potentially more troubling and much more powerful monopoly of data management:
iTunes needs to work together more seamlessly with other applications like iPhoto, and the internet-enabled address book I keep hoping for. Right now, when you sync your phone, you have both applications open up, competing for your attention. As more data needs to be synced to the phone, you don't want this to turn into a cacophony....
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Truth will prevail, even when it first has to minnow its way through the calcified brain of a music-industry chief. At least, this is the story coming out of the GSMA Mobile Asia Conference, as reported by MacUser. Edgar Bronfman, a senior Warner Brothers executive, admitted to institutional incompetence:
We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."
As TechCrunch notes, it's actually pretty amazing to hear the music chief openly admitting that the music industry considers[ed] its customers hostile combatants on the other side of a war.
Sad. But what may be worse is that Bronfman can't seem to understand the word "choice," as revealed by a later comment:
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