2 January 2007
Is Apple a Monopoly?
Apple Faces Federal Monopoly Suit
This kind of lawsuit drives me crazy. Is iPod the dominating force in portable music players? Yes. Is there anything wrong with that? No.. What has Apple not allowed? Opening the security that makes its service legal in the first place. The detractors will cry that since iPod is the dominant digital audio player, Apple is responsible for allowing competing services access to it. But Apple does allow this access. iPod never would have became dominant if it did not play MP3s. But MP3 is not secure, they whine, to which I retort “Then what do you want to do to Apple’s format?”
Oh.
iTunes runs on two microarchitectures on two operating systems to reach well beyond Apple’s own 3% of the computer market. It works just as well on Windows as Mac. In fact, I prefer iTunes on Windows! iPod is reasonably open to third party developers since introducing iPod games (and even before that, custom software existed). Third party hardware companies which interact with iPod over the Dock connector have existed for years. If companies are so desperate to exist in the iTunes ecosphere, they could just write their own audio player game. The only thing Apple has done is make a product so good and so compatible that it satisfies everything the bulk of users want in a digital audio player. And those who have different needs are free to choose any other product.
For the record, I was against the Microsoft monopoly suit in the late 90s, too. And even that suit had more merit than this one: Apple is not banning anyone from doing anything.