“A feud between Apple and RealNetworks over music downloads is exposing Jobs’ tragic flaw. Amazingly, he seems to be making the same devastating mistakes with the iPod that he made with the Mac 20 years ago,” Kevin Maney writes for USA Today.
“Just as it happened with PCs, other digital music products will narrow Apple’s technology lead. Maybe those products will never be as good as Apple’s, but they’ll become good enough – and they’ll be based on broader standards that don’t lock in users, and they’ll probably be cheaper. If history is any guide, when that happens Apple’s share of digital music will leach away,” Maney writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Mac required huge investments by developers to create compatible software. So, when faced with budgetary contraints, they chose to go with the most popular platforms. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded in any format the “developer” desires for very little cost. 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 to make it work perfectly on the Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. To draw an analogy between the Mac and the iPod highlights the writer’s ignorance of this fact.
If iPod is to go the way of the Mac thats Ok. Considering these days the Mac is going up up up up…..