Charles on… anything that comes along

Over at BusinessWeek, Alex Salkever writes about how Microsoft’s new “Plays For Sure” campaign (for digital players) could threaten Apple’s iPod supremacy: Many computer-industry analysts believe Apple made a fatal error when it decided not to license its proprietary Macintosh operating system to other computer makers. Apple wanted to own the whole chain — including software and hardware. Microsoft focused on the software alone, believing the more licensees, the merrier.

“Plays For Sure”. Hm, I wonder how long it’ll take people to mock up a “Sure Doesn’t Play On My iPod” logo.

Anyway, as has been pointed out by John Gruber, even if that’s true, it’s not necessarily the same now as then. For one thing, iPods work with Windows machines - which take rather more than 50% of iPod sales.

For another, had Apple licensed the MacOS, it would have been technology roadkill to Microsoft. The cloners nearly killed Apple off in the late 90s, until Jobs, returning, killed them (ignoring the contracts that said he couldn’t). Microsoft had the advantage that it was making the OS to go with IBM-compatible PCs, and corporations bought IBM-compatible PCs, and corporations buy a lot more PCs than consumers. The iPod is not - can you dig this? - a corporate product. This is a different game.

However considerations like this don’t stop Eeyore from saying the same thing he has for ages: Apple should license FairPlay. Open it up. Etc. To Salkever’s piece (which actually contains, like, figures and arguments) he says “Huh. Sounds like something I would have suggested. You know, several months ago.”

Sure, Paul, which is why Apple hires you for the big bucks to advise on its DRM licensing policy. What’s that you say? They don’t? You’re a hack like the rest of us? Well, bin your tedious soapbox then, unless you can line up some arguments for why it would help. Seriously, this sort of continual whining has only two endpoints: Apple does license, in which case Eeyore says “Told you so”, or it doesn’t, and the market changes significantly, in which case he says “They should have”.

But for the Apple execs, it’s a really subtle decision. Your company alone has 70 per cent of the download market. You’d surely like to get into the subscription market (despite having dissed it publicly). You have a huge share of the MP3 player market. When, precisely, is the right time to license? Let your rivals license all they like while they’re small. But in the question of making money from technology, timing is everything. Hold on too long and you might win all. Or not. There are no rule books in this, and the past is not a good guide either.

BTW, I respect Salkever - I think his article about how Apple should do iPhoto on Windows will come true very shortly. Meanwhile, an exercise for the reader: read the Salkever article referenced at the top of this post and replace “Apple” with “Microsoft” throughout. Realise how often you find yourself saying “Yeah, but who’s going to break its market dominance?” Then realise Microsoft doesn’t have market dominance back in this particular niche. Ponder.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Steve Wildstrom gets it wrong - unusually - on the iPod vs WMA (9 November 2004; score: 79.82%)
• Twitter is down. Gmail isn't working. At this rate.. (18 November 2008; score: 57.28%)
• How to be consistently wrong: think like Paul Thurrott on topics like DRM (28 February 2007; score: 56.09%)

Interesting: the New York Times reports that the Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.

This means if you’re found unconscious and brought in there could - go on, stretch your mind - be a way to find out if you’re allergic to this drug or on that medication before they treat you. (Anyone got stats for how many treatments produce adverse reactions? Happens all the time in ER, never in Green Wing, so life must be in the middle..

The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist.

Though you can see lots of hackers (in the having-fun sense) would enjoy buying an RFID reader and seeing how many health records they could download while walking through the mall…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• If the name fits... (26 May 2005; score: 48.44%)
• Bilateral life vs singular life (28 October 2006; score: 43.84%)
• Cochlear implants: what it sounds like for someone who gets one (1 December 2008; score: 42.16%)

AppleInsider has an entirely credible scoop suggesting that Apple is going soon to release a fifth-generation iPod that will have a 60Gb hard drive (as announced earlier this year by Toshiba) and store photos. There’ll be a 2″ colour screen, and outputs for TV.

But, you might ask, why not video too? Even though the screen’s tiny, some people are sufficiently masochistic to try to watch stuff on them. Is it that Quicktime is too hard to squeeze into the memory?
Nah. Think about it. It’s because of battery life. Video murders batteries running hard drives.

The iPod presently has 32Mb of RAM (or similar) into which the hard drive caches the next chunk of songs. (That’s why the iPod box promises “30-minute jog protection” or similar.) Hard drive spins up, fills RAM, goes to sleep. Nice and easy. If the battery was running all the time, you’d suck your battery dry very quickly.

I forecast this photoPod will do photo slideshows on its screen (perhaps while playing music; you could have 64Mb of RAM, split half and half for music and photos, or dynamically allocated). That’s easy: set the slideshow, and you can stuff 30-odd photos into the RAM buffer.

Contrast that with video: MPEG-2 uses up 1Gb/hr = about 17Mb/min. So you’ve squashed it down dramatically to accommodate your tiny screen, but even a factor of 10 improvement means you’re using twice as much memory per minute as with music. Your batteries are going to suffer for it; and that’s before you get on to the increased energy demanded by the colour screen, which for video needs to be bright and specific enough for you to be able to distinguish movement.

So, a photoPod, not a videoPod. Though I’m sure people will use it to store video…
One point: all this is my own musings. No insider contacts were killed in the making of this post.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• iPod arrives... and is a clunker^W^W ..maybe OK (20 October 2005; score: 78.26%)
• New battery, same old lifestyle (27 August 2006; score: 73.36%)
• Those video iPod announcements analysed (15 October 2005; score: 65.21%)