Quote:
Originally Posted by Sevenfeet 
All of you that think that Palm has every right to worm it's way into syncing with iTunes never went to business school or law school. iTunes is not an operating system. Mac OS X and Windows are designed with APIs so that developers will do as much as possible with it so people will go out and buy Macs or Windows machines respectively. This is how their business models for these products works.
iTunes is an individual program running on Mac OS X or Windows. Because of that, it's not designed by Apple to promote selling Macs. It's designed to promote that other profitable Apple venture, iPods and iPhones. Yes, iTunes used to support third party MP3 players in the early days but those days ended after iTunes came to Windows. Since iTunes business model is iPod/iPhone profit margins, Apple has zero interest in having any other company's device talk to it.
And iTunes is not just a program with a few dozen developers supporting the product on Mac and Windows. iTunes has hundreds of programmers supporting one of the most complex infrastructures in modern computing. The iTunes store is a huge technology operation covering millions of SKUs (songs, music videos, movies, TV shows...all with contracts that have to be honored), dozens of countries of operation, an iPhone app store with 60,000+ apps in it (with their own pricing policies) and a security model that keeps your credit card information safe. And they spend lots of money promoting it and marketing it. The technical operation is reportedly the largest single instance of SAP ERP software on the planet. The Oracle database is also likely to be enormous and complex. And all of it has to run on thousands of servers in several parts of the world just to keep up with the load. You think Apple is building that data center in North Carolina at the tune of 1 billion dollars because it feels like it?
Apple has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over several years making sure this operation works every time a user accesses it. And sometimes its been stretched to the breaking point (remember when iPhones first had problems in activation? They have spent countless hours in design, architecture, programming, regression testing (involving every iPod & iPhone ever made) and go-live projects...all of which you never see.
So now Palm wants to piggyback on those efforts just to sell a few Pres and avoid having to invest in the man-hours and infrastructure Apple has done. Are you kidding me? At best, its intellectually lazy. At worst, it' probably illegal due to the DMCA, or violation of the EULA. Now, I have no doubt that Palm will make its own music program eventually. They are exposed to too much risk with the current hack. Palm doesn't have the resources to build its own music/video store so I would think they would partner with someone like Amazon. But that will cost money too. Every wonder why Apple says that the iTunes store isn't that profitable? Read my piece about the infrastructure costs again.
Palm needs to stop iTunes integration before Apple decides to make an example of them.
All of you that think that Palm has every right to worm it's way into syncing with iTunes never went to business school or law school. iTunes is not an operating system. Mac OS X and Windows are designed with APIs so that developers will do as much as possible with it so people will go out and buy Macs or Windows machines respectively. This is how their business models for these products works.
iTunes is an individual program running on Mac OS X or Windows. Because of that, it's not designed by Apple to promote selling Macs. It's designed to promote that other profitable Apple venture, iPods and iPhones. Yes, iTunes used to support third party MP3 players in the early days but those days ended after iTunes came to Windows. Since iTunes business model is iPod/iPhone profit margins, Apple has zero interest in having any other company's device talk to it.
And iTunes is not just a program with a few dozen developers supporting the product on Mac and Windows. iTunes has hundreds of programmers supporting one of the most complex infrastructures in modern computing. The iTunes store is a huge technology operation covering millions of SKUs (songs, music videos, movies, TV shows...all with contracts that have to be honored), dozens of countries of operation, an iPhone app store with 60,000+ apps in it (with their own pricing policies) and a security model that keeps your credit card information safe. And they spend lots of money promoting it and marketing it. The technical operation is reportedly the largest single instance of SAP ERP software on the planet. The Oracle database is also likely to be enormous and complex. And all of it has to run on thousands of servers in several parts of the world just to keep up with the load. You think Apple is building that data center in North Carolina at the tune of 1 billion dollars because it feels like it?
Apple has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over several years making sure this operation works every time a user accesses it. And sometimes its been stretched to the breaking point (remember when iPhones first had problems in activation? They have spent countless hours in design, architecture, programming, regression testing (involving every iPod & iPhone ever made) and go-live projects...all of which you never see.
So now Palm wants to piggyback on those efforts just to sell a few Pres and avoid having to invest in the man-hours and infrastructure Apple has done. Are you kidding me? At best, its intellectually lazy. At worst, it' probably illegal due to the DMCA, or violation of the EULA. Now, I have no doubt that Palm will make its own music program eventually. They are exposed to too much risk with the current hack. Palm doesn't have the resources to build its own music/video store so I would think they would partner with someone like Amazon. But that will cost money too. Every wonder why Apple says that the iTunes store isn't that profitable? Read my piece about the infrastructure costs again.
Palm needs to stop iTunes integration before Apple decides to make an example of them.
You have to understand, there are only two kinds of Pre owners: 1) ones like me that bought it because we liked Sprint's plans and it was a decent phone and 2) people who wanted an iPhone that was made by anyone but Apple.
The first crowd sees all of this for what it is, the second crowd just wants another chance to tell Apple to go fuck itself.
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) will come up with something better than iTunes. Which forces Apple to make iTunes better than it is today. What's wrong with forcing Palm (and others) to compete. So long as the playing field remains level for everyone. Consumers win.
) Which will make Apple iTunes Store even more dominant. Then you'll be back here complaining about how Apple illegally bully their way into taking over the online music and video market by allowing easy access to iTunes.
