Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Le French shutdowne du Applee

What do you all think about the French government forcing Apple to share it's music file format with all the competition? Personlly I am a bit divided on the issue. Having been on the other side of the fence with Microsoft and how they have stiffled competition. But I believe it is different in that Microsoft went to some extreme measures to cut out competition. Purposefully making some programs not work properly on their system, such as Netscape. Paying other companies to file lawsuits against there competitiors so that MS name is not attached. Once a monopoly starts to bully and abuse the competitors then it may be time for some sort of divestiture, to stimulate competition once again. But with the iPod, Apple does allow for non copy protected songs to be played on them so they are not locking others out completely. Of course no music company will sell there music without copy protection. If people are really that unhappy with iTunes and the iPod then they can burn all of there songs to a CD and reload them on a MS based music player. So I don't know if the law change would truly apply to Apple. There is some quality loss though. I have done it myself and have not noticed much difference but if you compress the file again to MP3 then it sounds like a loss of quality. I suppose Apple could just pull completely out of France, and then call their iPods, FreedomPods. But the market is big, the second biggest in Europe, and they could just have French iPods with a new open copy protection scheme that only works on iPods made for the French.

1 comment:

Macintosha Fanatica said...

Stitch, I completely agree that the situation with the Microsoft monopoly is simply not the same as the iPod iTunes system. Consumers do indeed have a choice, and if they truly want to, they can buy stuff on other stores and get them on their iPod. The thing is, consumers are getting what they need from the iTunes music store. Just my 2 cents.