“Lately, I’ve written extensively about Apple Computer’s moves in the connected home, and certainly some of the company’s well-designed products – especially its best-selling iPod – are hits with users. But as much as Apple’s fans would love to believe that one company can go it alone against a consortium of consumer electronics and PC industry titans, both history and current events tell us otherwise. In other words, I’ve got bad news for Apple: Unless you make some changes, and quickly, you’ve already lost the game,” Paul Thurrott writes for Connected Home media.

“Consider Apple’s DRM scheme, which is among the least restrictive, but also among the least inclusive. (It applies only to music purchased from Apple, and not to other media types or other suppliers.) Customers who purchase songs from the iTunes Music Store can download purchased songs only once, and all sales are final. Once purchased, a song can be played back on ‘up to five Apple-authorized devices at any time’ (currently, this means Macs or PCs with Apple’s iTunes installed), can be burned as part of a playlist up to seven times, and can be stored on up to five Apple iPods at a time (but on no other devices). And like all DRM schemes, Apple reserves the right to change its terms at any time, a decision that will affect prior purchases as well as new ones. In fact, Apple has changed its DRM policy at least once already. And this, folks, is arguably the least onerous DRM scheme I’ve encountered so far,” Thurrott writes.

“As we move forward, I expect the least restrictive DRM schemes to catch on with consumers, because that’s typically the way the open market works. However, Apple’s initial success with the iTunes Music Store (more than 125 million songs sold and a catalog of more than 1 million titles to choose from) won’t necessarily translate into continued success in the future. Indeed, the company is making the same mistakes that doomed its otherwise excellent Mac product line to less than 2 percent of worldwide market share in the PC industry. Instead of licensing its technology and opening the iTunes DRM scheme (called FairPlay), Apple is circling the wagons and refusing to allow others to access its crown jewels. Aside from a couple partners — HP and Motorola, neither of which has direct access to Apple’s DRM technology – Apple is replaying its Mac single-source experiment, except that this time the stakes are much, much higher. The consumer electronics market dwarfs the PC market and will likely continue growing in the future as the PC business slows down,” Thurrott writes.

“Apple’s short-term success is very real and quite admirable, but the company’s inability to see coming trends in video, subscription content, and interoperability suggests that Apple is repeating the mistakes of the past. In the 1980s, the Mac held an early lead over the PC but was quickly buried after the industry standardized on a common Microsoft technology. Today, that series of events is repeating itself, and online music services – and to a greater degree, the digital delivery of all media types – is very much at a nascent stage. If Apple doesn’t change its ways, the company simply won’t survive… If you care about Apple, like I do, it’s time to take a stand and ask the company — no, beg the company — to reevaluate its posture and open its products. Otherwise, we’ll simply look back on the iPod and smile sadly, as we do when we think about other once-hot fads — like Pet Rocks, Rubik’s Cubes, and Ouija Boards,” Thurrott writes.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Another day, another “iPod may go the way of the Mac” article. It initially seems plausible to compare the Mac with the iPod in this way, but, if you think about it, it’s a faulty conceit. The Macintosh platform required and still requires huge investments by developers to create compatible software. So, when faced with budgetary contraints, they chose and still sometimes choose to go with the most popular platform. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded, for very little cost, in any format the “developers” (musicians and labels) desire: AAC, MP3, WMA, etc. The music doesn’t need to be rewritten, recorded, and remastered. It’s like writing Photoshop once and then pressing a button to translate it for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. Whomever draws an analogy between Mac OS licensing and the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship is simply highlighting their ignorance of the vast differences between the two business situations.

An article by John Gruber entitled, “Why 2004 Won’t Be Like 1984,” posted on Daring Fireball here is well worth reading regarding this subject.