Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Kevin Maney, technology columnist for USA Today, has written this incredibly misinformed article about the iPod and Apple’s alleged certain doom. The problem is, Mr. Maney’s facts and reasoning simply don’t stand up to scrutiny and his complete misunderstanding of Apple, and possibly computing as a whole, are sadly apparent.

I really don’t like writing line-by-line rebuttals to uninformed articles, but sometimes its the only real way to form a comprehensive response and point out fallacy.

“Apple could have reaped the benefits of having dozens, even hundreds of imitators all adding their own unique value to the Mac,” wrote Jim Carlton in his 1997 book, Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders. “Legions of suppliers would have sprung up all around the world to furnish components such as disk drives and memory. And since the software was light-years ahead of everybody else’s, the Mac’s, not Windows, might have come to dominate the personal computer market.”

By imitators, I’m assuming the author is referring to cloners. When you have a moment, Mr. Maney, ask IBM what hundreds of imitators did for their PC business. IBM was the original producer of the Intel PC as we know it, a position analogous to Apple at the time. Where is IBM in the PC market today? They’re certainly not the dominant player they were in 1985. Apple didn’t want to be pushed out of the market it created as IBM was. Twenty years later, despite some stumbles under non-Jobs management, Apple is a healthy, profitable, debt-free, innovative company that still produces the Macintosh line of computers. Domination is not necessarily survival. Majority is not necessarily quality. Sales are not necessarily profit.

Also, there is no shortage of components for Apple machines. They use the same memory as any PC. They use the same IDE disks. They use the same DVI. They use the same Bluetooth. And any USB or Firewire peripheral you care to name will likely work as well or better on a Mac than a PC.

Instead, the opposite happened for Apple, and the PC crowd took advantage of those kinds of economics. This year, Apple is left with less than 4% of the market for personal computers Ñ basically a cult following.

Apple’s user base is always classified as a cult following, and that phrase is more true than not. However, the percentage of machines shipped by a manufacturer in a given quarter is not the proper metric with which to measure a platform’s penetration. The number of currently active users is far more important, and Apple has tens of millions of them. Before you put that number down relative to active PC users, think about how many manufacturing businesses would be ecstatic to have tens of millions of people using their products. Too many businesses to count have market shares far, far below 1% in their respective fields and yet are somehow successful. I encourage the readers of this article to think about their employer’s market share and the overall financial health of their company.

But like the Mac of 1985, it’s a closed system. Other than open-source MP3 files, only music downloaded through iTunes will play on iPods, and iTunes music won’t play on any portable device except an iPod. Apple refuses to license the technology to third parties. Instead of setting a standard for all, Apple wants to own it all. When Microsoft behaves that way, everybody screams antitrust.

HP has licensed the iPod from Apple and will begin selling their own HP-branded iPods this month. BMW has an agreement with Apple to include iPods in their cars. Motorola recently announced that songs downloaded from iTunes will be playable on their phones. Where is this refusal to license you speak of? Apple has licensed iPod / iTunes technology to other companies, although they’ve been selective as to who they’ve licensed to. And they have every right to be as picky as they want.

Last week, Real publicly exposed Apple’s obduracy. Real announced that it has a way for people to legally download and play songs that work on both Apple’s products and Windows-based products. It’s the kind of flexibility consumers want. But Apple doesn’t seem to care.

I challenge anyone to provide me with a reliable source (excluding Real) that shows there is widespread demand for Real-provided content on the iPod. Customers don’t want Real. Customers want a simple, reliable way to purchase inexpensive music and carry it on a portable player. Apple has provided that.

As I’ve stated before on this page, when customers choose the iPod, they have already chosen against Real. By Real’s own admission, there are already 70+ Real-compatible players available. If Real compatibility is important to a buyer, there are plenty of choices.

And speaking of flexibility, why won’t Real license its codec for use in other media players, such as Apple’s Quicktime? Real has refused to share their codec for years predating the iPod despite Apple’s repeated requests. Where is Real’s concern about choice when it comes to media players?

“Apple is behaving stupidly as usual with regard to allowing other companies to add value to its products,” says Avram Miller, a tech investor and former vice president at Intel, which benefited greatly from Jobs’ past mistakes. “It can only lead to reducing (Apple’s) share of the market it helped create.”

Nonsense. Apple has allowed plenty of companies to add value to the iPod. (And those are just the ones sold at the Apple Store. A Google search will undoubtedly reveal more.) And pursuant to a paragraph above, I would contend that IBM’s decisions are what allowed Intel to profit, not Apple’s. If Apple had become the dominant computing platform through cloning, Intel wouldn’t have benefited from that - Motorola would have. It was IBM’s decision to open their architecture that allowed Intel to profit, not Apple’s refusal to open a system that Intel wasn’t part of anyway.

Just as it happened with PCs, other digital music products will narrow Apple’s technology lead. Maybe those products will never be as good as Apple’s, but they’ll become good enough Ñ and they’ll be based on broader standards that don’t lock in users, and they’ll probably be cheaper.

There are already other digital music products out there are are cheaper and not as good as Apple’s, but good enough. In the past 3 years, the iPod has been assaulted by any number of players from Dell, Creative, Rio, and others, yet the iPod is still gaining ground. Obviously there is a logical limit as to how large the iPod’s share can grow, but it will be a major player for some time to come.

Which broader standards do these players use that the iPod does not? Real’s format is not a broad standard, it is only provided by Real and we’ve already discussed their reluctance to open their codec. WMA is not a broad standard, it is only provided by Microsoft and doesn’t work on any platform except Windows. (I realize there is a Windows Media Player for Mac, but frankly, its WMA support sucks. I wouldn’t call it a real WMA player, but that potential debate is for another time.) MP3 is a broad standard that works on any platform, and the iPod supports that. AAC is an open standard capable of playing on any platform, and the iPod supports that. WAV is a broad standard that works on any platform, and the iPod supports that.

Mr. Maney, I would suggest that in the future, you become more familiar with Apple technologies and events before writing about them.