Re: Apple--the new Microsoft

It is alleged that Elmo P. Shagnasty claimed:

> People love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12
> iPods in the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want
> to buy music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an
> Apple cell phone from AT&T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want
> only to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone?
> ITunes.
>
> Apple not only "bundles" iTunes with multiple products, it forces you to
> use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you could always just download
> a competitor and ignore IE.
>
> Not fair, you might say. Any hardware device that syncs data with a PC
> as part of its core functionality has software to facilitate that
> syncing. True enough. But operating systems have browsers as part of
> core functionality, too. Doesn't Mac OS X come with Safari? Doesn't the
> iPhone?
>
> And "bundling" works. Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has
> distributed 600 million copies of iTunes to date. The overwhelming
> majority of those copies were iTunes for Windows. And iTunes for
> Windows' popularity isn't driven by software product quality. ITunes is
> the slowest, clunkiest, most nonintuitive application on my system. But
> I need it because I love my iPods.
>
> At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or
> any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my
> iPod and install something else? Can I uninstall iTunes but keep using
> the iTunes store and my iPods? Apple strongly discourages all that,
> claiming that the iPod, the iPod software and iTunes are three
> components of the same product. But that's what Microsoft said about
> Windows and IE.

Funny... when I was using an iPod, I never used iTunes to sync my music
collection. I used Anapod or Winamp. Being a Winamp user for my
desktop media player, I had no use for iTunes or the iTunes store
anyway.

--
Jeffrey Kaplan www.gordol.org
The from userid is killfiled Send personal mail to gordol

Peter's Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord, #30.
All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly
thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will
surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic
relief.