Now you have many valid points in this email...and I agree with
practically all of it. But the argument was about whether they were a
monopoly, not whether they are angels. Frankly, I think their stances on
BD is nuts and I will never buy a movie from itunes. But why should when
I can make my own. I do feel sorry for those who do use itunes, but
then again, they don't seem to mind being ripped off for low def
movies. I think they have done plenty for people to be pissed about,
but I'm be hard pressed to find a big company that doesn't upset someone
sooner or later or do some things that are highly questionable.
On 12/10/2011 5:23 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I think we get too tied up in this monopoly crap. To be honest, I
don't think they are a monopoly - though I do think they have done
some things that are frankly "bad faith" toward both the user,
anti-competitive towards their own marketplace, and in some cases
boarderline blackmail. But a lot of those things relate to how they
have practiced iTunes and their merchant vendor policy. Apple's
biggest issues have been that "if they don't like it, it doesn't get
in the store".. this form of censorship was bad before, but under
their new agreements, they've eliminated out partner ads, sell
through, etc. which is something that has several newspapers and
others furious - with fair reason.
Their practices go beyond that in the music industry, though, where
independents have went from stonewalled to giving up higher cuts, and
studios (large entities) have been told that if they don't provide
Apple specific "exclusives" to attach to their titles, Apple won't
sell, etc. Apple also engaged in a price-fixing scheme regarding
ebooks - which threatened to raise the price of all ebooks for
everyone, and put a big hurt on Barnes & Noble and Amazon, etc. and
got the EU involved.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/12/european-antitrust-regulators-investigate-apple-and-worlds-e-book-publishers-.html
I have no big issue with Apple. I use an iPad2 I enjoy. While
Scott may have one viewpoint, from an administration view, I really
dislike them, but then again, we don't deploy any of them in any of
our facilities. ( I admit, I'm still getting used to being now a
corporate IT head, and it's.. interesting dealing with divisions in
every continent in the world and six in the US.. big change of
pace). But we liked Apple enough that we switched over all of our
manager to iPhone and WP7 and dropped RIM (and killed all BB Servers)
entirely this summer - that was a big hit in some ways, you're talking
deploying 300+ iPhones, 100+ WP7 phones. From that perspective, I
can tell you that while I admire the cool sleekness of the iPhone4/4S,
the administration of those devices is not nearly as smooth from a
corporate standard as it should be, and their reliance on iTunes and
the like is often insanely annoying.
On a daily basis, I deal with systems that run everything from Windows
Server, Win7, BSD, and hell, hell, then again, if I could kill baan,
man would I be light years ahead.
But I get the love for Apple. I don't have much hatred for Apple; I
think they are a good product that if I were recommending to someone
who just used the internet etc. as their primary purpose, it's ideal,
minimal hastle, etc.
Win7 is, frankly, MS's most solid product I've seen and thus why
adoption was good. It runs as it should, faster then you'd think it
should, and it's software library is immense. Apple gets love, but
you have to realize, as others point out, they are still 9% of the
market, so.. it's not as though tomorrow everyone is hopping to Apple.
Because Apple is a smaller marketshare and a single vendor, they can
control things that Microsoft can't. MS doesn't control if someone
puts Win7 on a POS desktop and so people have a bad experience. They
don't handle hardware at all. So, there is a difference..
I'm glad Apple is doing well, glad it's a great experience for them.
I do think what they have done with the music and book industry is
wrong, and I completely dislike their anti-blu-ray stance which is
solely aimed at taking on a superior format with a higher cost/lower
value format that they sell.
(seriously: I bought the Blu-Ray of The Help today for $19. All
extras, beautiful 1080P at high bitrate, great look, digital copy
available, tons of extras, my own physical copy. For a dollar MORE,
I could have had it from iTunes with 1/8th the bitrate, a DD5.1
(basic, lossy) compressed audio, etc. So, why would you spend more
to get so much less? Oh, because Apple doesn't let you watch Bluray
on their units.. that's OK, if you buy it here at a higher cost, you
can play it back on your tv... kind of, as long as you have an AppleTV.
I don't know.. there are things I dislike about Apple.. but there are
things I dislike about every company I know of. I can't think of any
of them that are "right" all the time. And they are in it to make
money, so as long as they get away with it and people are dumb enough
to go along (I don't mean on the units, I mean on their irrational
iTunes pricing)
