“With more competitors jumping into the market, the question is whether Apple will be able to keep its dominance in the portable music player market or whether the iPod will eventually go the way of the firm’s Macintosh business, which accounted for only 1.9 percent of the overall PC market last year, according to research firm Gartner,” Matthew Yi writes for The San Francisco Chronicle.
“Richard Doherty, an analyst at the technology research firm Envisioneering, said Apple is simply being selective about its partners,” Yi reports. “Jobs ‘is doing very, very careful licensing with the right world-class companies, whether it be HP or BMW,’ he said. In June, Apple announced a deal that allows BMW to integrate the iPod with the carmaker’s stereo system.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is a better article than most of the others looking at Mac history vs. iPod ‘licensing,’ because it strives to present a balanced look at the matter. However, Yi never comes right out and says that the basic concept itself (Apple’s repeating their Macintosh mistakes with the iPod, so the iPod is doomed) is fatally flawed, so we will:
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
