Re: [tlug] About to break down and get an iPhone

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:
> Edward Middleton wrote:
>   
>> Martin Killmann wrote:
>>     
>>> Apple will never control ... the cell phone market, ...
>>> ... They don't have the products for a monopoly position ...
>>>       
>> Apples actions dictate what they are, which is what I was talking
>> about.  Their products are clearly capable of taking a monopoly position
>> as evidence by their dominance in music distribution.
>>     
>
> Hrm, I don't think so. Even their "dominance in music distribution" is
> somewhat of an overstatement.

Yes that was poorly stated.  They make money off the devices not the
distribution.

>  They were the first player to build a
> good online store that integrated well with their hardware music
> player, but now Amazon (full disclosure: my employer) are in the game,
> and it seems that as of six months ago, Amazon MP3 downloads accounted
> for between 8% - 15% of all paid music downloads:
>
> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081215/amazons-mp3-store-one-year-in-no-itunes-killer-probably-wont-be/
>
> Amazon's presence in the market forced Apple to go DRM-free (on some
> stuff).

DRM-free music was always in Apples interest, they were held back from
this by the music labels.  I remember reading somewhere that Jobs stated
any DRM would inevitable be broken but it was the price he had to pay to
get favorable distribution rights from the record labels.

> I just don't see the Mac offerings ever achieving a monopoly in the
> desktop PC market. One important reason for that is that thin clients
> are probably the wave of the future. I imagine that five years from
> now, the trend of running more and more of your apps in a web browser
> will hold for most people. Ten years from now, I imagine that most
> apps will live in the cloud, and most people will have a keitai that
> will double as a netbook and a docking station at home to send the
> display to their 90-inch wide flatscreen LCD.
>   

Well this is the Amazon vision ;)  I guess it will depend on how willing
people are "to welcome our new corporate overlords."  I hope that with
crackdowns on offshore tax evasion[1] and increases in identity theft,
people will start to consider more carefully what sort of information,
and control of information, they provide to third parties.

Edward

1. Using information ostensibly collected to fight terrorism.