In Fortune Magazine’s exclusive coverage of Apple, iTunes, iPod, and the iTunes Music Store, a few gems stand out, namely, that Apple is planning on “rolling out iTunes for Windows” and the potentially blockbuster news that a “deal with AOL [that] would land the iTunes Music Store on the desktops of AOL’s 26 million subscribers” might be in the works.
“Jobs has been very shrewd about the way he moved the iPod into the PC universe. Anyone who has tried the iPod with both systems will tell you it’s a lot more fun to use if you plug it into a Mac running Apple’s OS X than into a Dell with Windows XP. ‘The Windows iPod sucks’ is Seal’s appraisal. ‘But what they are really doing is trying to get people to wonder, ‘Hmm, should I switch over?” Jobs is betting that the iTunes Music Store, like the iPod, could be just such a Trojan horse.”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. How many Windows iPod owners know what they’re missing by not using OS X? Do any of them really care? Perhaps that’s why Jobs is rolling out iTunes for Windows too. In fact, Warner’s Roger Ames is trying to broker a deal in which AOL would adopt iTunes as its music-manage-ment software. “Steve was resistant at first,” Ames says. “But now I understand that he’s decided to go that way.” AOL has been trying to develop its own music store to go along with its subscription service but hasn’t figured out a billing system for individual tracks as Apple has. A deal with AOL would land the iTunes Music Store on the desktops of AOL’s 26 million subscribers. That could quickly make Apple the dominant seller of digital music on the Internet. AOL would neither confirm nor deny a possible deal.”
“A big play for Windows users would be a huge shift for a man who has largely created a product–the Mac–that exists in a walled garden cut off from the much vaster PC world. Clearly, Apple will benefit enormously if it boosts its share of the computer market by even 1%–such a gain would lift its revenues by nearly a third and increase profits even more. In the meantime, if the iTunes Music Store takes off–and computer users of all stripes start buying millions of songs online each month–that will translate into tens of millions of dollars in new revenues per month for Apple.”
Full article here.
Re: “the Mac–that exists in a walled garden” Sorry, but it is the PC world which has built the walled garden. Macs have Virtual PC, Office for the Mac and iPods that work with PCs. However, rarely do any PC users get to cross over to Macs; the wall is to keep PC users in, not to keep Mac users out
John’s observation is right on! The wall that locks in PC users is Bill G’s versions of the Iron Curtain. When you have a relatively open, standards based system like OS X that runs Unix apps, Linux apps, Mac Classic apps, OS X native apps and even MS apps under emulation on the same box (even at the same time), how is that a walled garden?
“In a world without fences, who needs Gates?”
Cheers all
If nothing else, these high profile rumors are really creating a huge buzz about Apple right now.
iTunes for AOL? I love iTunes, I loathe AOL. But I guess it’s one hell of a product to put out to show them what the Mac and the Mac experience is all about, so I grungingly accept the potential teamup
Don’t worry about AOL. Get the service to all the other mac user first. International
Look at it this way – Windows users buy lots of Apple made products and music, helping Apple to be solvent and able to make great Macs for us. There may be method to this madness – getting Windows users to support the Macintosh community. I love it.
Since it seems iTunes is being ported to Windows, why would you even need an AOL version?
This is why I come to MacDailyNews. Every Mac site and their brothers missed this story, but MDN bothers to actually READ the articles and quote the relevant portions. Love it – keep up the excellent work.
“Re: “the Mac–that exists in a walled garden” Sorry, but it is the PC world which has built the walled garden. Macs have Virtual PC, Office for the Mac and iPods that work with PCs. However, rarely do any PC users get to cross over to Macs; the wall is to keep PC users in, not to keep Mac users out”
To extend your metaphor further–and this is always tricky–, the USSR erected the Berlin Wall for just such a reason, to “keep people in” because all of the rich opportunities were out there, in the West Berlin and, by extension, in the West in general. The oppressed in the East were cut off, in the shadows of East Berlin from which it was virtually impossible to escape because corrupted Communism promoted only the party line.
Occasionally we saw, on TV, an East German soldier or a desperate civilian jumping over the slivers of broken fenestration embedded into the concrete cap of the wall. The West rejoyced and marveled because it already was aware of the abundant intellectually, artistic, and economic opportunities here. Yet the Eastern regime was content with the mediocrity of its rigid but fragile system it set up and forced on its citizens until, one day, it and the wall callaped from its own top-heavy weight to be no more. From the ashes of the USSR rose a weak, third world country, nostalgically trying to remember its greatness but, unable to prop up its economy via deficit spending (think Bush here also) and, having learned from its bankrupt past, is now content to bottom feed (maybe this is too harsh) as it muddles along, not being able to even overtake the Chechens.
In the same way, I want Microsoft to read this and spend lots of brainpower and money to try to prevent the same fate to itself so that it can weaken itself via sheer internal heavy self-analysis into a stupor which overpowers its forward thrust and limited creativity so that it dessicates itself just like it has illegally trounced its competition. If this happens, history will once again show that a well-fed cat gets fat, one that is no longer sharp, can’t any longer pounce on a quicker and more nimble prey, and become content to muddle its way as it weakens itself and becomes irrelevant while really creative companies then begin to contribute and extend the technology to the benefit of the consumer instead of sucking all the blood out of him.
The attribution to Forbes magazine is wrong. It is from Fortune magazine – a significant point because Fortune is a product of the same AOL Time Warner parent company as Warner Music & AOL.
In any event, the AOL deal would be a major one, not just because it offers 26 million potential users but because of how it would impact MusicNet, along with Pressplay one of the two major legal competitors to Apple’s venture. MusicNet is a joint venture of AOL Time Warner, RealNetworks, & “big five” labels EMI & BMG (Bertelsmann).
Lino Triestino, Tim de lange, everyone, thank you.
These all seem to be wonderful or at least interesting comments. This is funny in that it seems like we’re all in college, having a geo-political discussion about history, trojan horses and fat cats…
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Encore…?
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Mr. D, thanks for the correction. The attribution has been fixed.
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