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Its not exactly a good thing that they leveraged itunes library vendor lock-in to drive market share early on. The anti-consumer aspects of their closed ecosys
by leothecool 6y ago
Its not exactly a good thing that they leveraged itunes library vendor lock-in to drive market share early on. The anti-consumer aspects of their closed ecosystem directly resulted in their success. There's no doubt about it.
- dijit 6y agoSorry, I don't buy this at all. iTunes library (at least for Books and Music) is DRM-free and has been from an early stage (though _did_ launch with DRM). I've had great success in migrating my purchased items back and forth from linux with absolutely no issue. However now they're using streaming and I'm unable to easily "own" any music anymore... or at the very least it takes you off of the easy path.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoAre iBooks DRM-Free now? That's exciting, do you know when that happened?
- aardvarkr 6y agoYeah, apple was one of the first to go DRM free for music. That was a big deal and a bold move by apple.
- leothecool 6y agoRight. At launch, leveraging ipod marketshare was key. After those same users got locked in to the app-store, the music library lock in became less important. So they started out by letting you pay extra money to break out of their walled garden. I'm pretty sure purchases made in the ipod era are still drm encumbered today.
- dkonofalski 6y agoApple wanted to launch iTunes as DRM-free but wasn't able to negotiate the licensing for it. The content providers were the ones that made the DRM a requirement.
- zepto 6y agoYes, and then Apple convinced them to go DRM free. iTunes has been DRM free for more than a decade now.
- dkonofalski 6y agoYes, I know that. I was just pointing out to the person claiming that Apple was the one that initiated DRM in iTunes that Apple never wanted it to begin with.
- zepto 6y agoOk, your comment left it ambiguous as to what state it ended up in.
- dkonofalski 6y agoAgreed. Can't edit it anymore, though. :( Thanks for clarifying.