Quote:
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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
But with the iPod, you can easily import MP3 files from sources other than iTunes, and this doesn't make for a losing earnings scenario for Apple. Even without iTunes, they've taken the MP3 player market hands-down.
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I find myself wondering if some of that effect might not be psychological.
What I mean is, folks might react negatively to a music player that only plays one format, and/or is locked into a single source of music, and resist buying any such device. (we see a lot of that sort of attitude on e-readers too)
But what Apple did was say, "okay, here's a really cool music player that'll play whatever music you have electronically -- oh, and by the way, we've got a service that sells music too, but
that music can
only play on
our players." (that's changing now, of course)
My theory is that by doing that, they may have avoided (most of) the reflexive resistance to a 'locked' device, by offering an 'unlocked' device and a 'locked' content service (said locked service was needful in getting the content providers to buy into the idea). And then, once folks have the devices, they decide that maybe that really easy iTunes Store with the huge selection of music, isn't so bad and scary after all, and why not just buy their new stuff there after they're done ripping all their existing CDs?
Of course, that's also what Sony's trying to do by allowing more 'standard' file formats, and offering the ConnStore (though it's got a ways to go before it gets easy or big). True, in this case the approach suffers some from a lack of an existing, widely held, large pool of digital content already in the users' hands, but there you go.
I have noticed that folks tend to react negatively to the idea of the ConnStore, until they hear about RTF support (when I mention them in that order), and that they don't seem to be disturbed by the ConnStore if I tell them about the RTF support
first.
Just my random thoughts, there, and they're fairly fresh, so salt to taste.
