DrunkenBlog

Apple gets around to disabling Harmony on the iPod

My inbox is somewhat abuzz about Apple quietly releasing a firmware update for the iPod that disables Real's Harmony technology. After I get through my email bin, I almost don't have to check my feeds. When it's 1am and I haven't even touched them, having the news come to you is kinda cool.

I've talked about this before, so most of my half-baked thoughts are in:

• Convergence Kills
• Convergence Kills (Redux)
• A Real Gamble

I can understand Apple's reasoning for it, even if my half-baked thoughts on the subject don't pan out.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of noise there is from this, to be honest the fact that there is any noise benefits Real in huge ways... at the moment, they're a bit player getting press with a larger player. There's a reason why the incumbent in a race generally tries to say 'my opponent' rather than actually say the guy's name.

Just being mentioned as a foil against Apple gives them legitimacy they wouldn't otherwise have in terms of marketshare. Admittedly, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and think of this market as anything but immature and in its infancy.

Remember, there has been more than one case where a company was selling a platform to consumers and either seemed light years ahead of the competition, or had a stranglehold on the market... chances are what you're reading this on came out of it.

When you're this soon out of the gate, things can change very, very quickly and this is by no means a done deal. I want to start quoting "The Innovators Delemma" here, but I digress.

As I've mentioned before, I don't have any love for Real, although I try to be objective about where someone is now versus where they used to be. I don't trust the company as far as I could throw it, but Mac users should own up that Apple could easily come out of this smelling anything like a rose as this goes on.

Real says they sold 3 million songs during their 3 week price binge, and I don't have any reason to believe them. Three million songs isn't anything to actually sneeze at, and could well represent 10k-50k users who might want to putting their music on their iPod.

It's easy to discount them and say, "Yeah, well, what did you expect to happen?", but these people can still make a hell of a lot of noise if they so choose, and chances are it'll be pointed in Apple's direction. And this is probably a game Real gets out of playing over and over than Apple will.

It also makes Mac users remember something they often try to forget is even a variable: that Apple is a public company... a corporation. It's really, really hard for a corporation to be cool. Having cool people in it really helps, and cool products helps even more... but they're still going to, and in some cases have to do lots of things that aren't cool.

I.E., you can understand why Apple has resorted to, say, invoking the DMCA and other types of things, but it doesn't mean it's not uncool, and having to act as the apologist can get old.

And this really isn't a cool move, and is hard to apologize for. I can understand hating Real with such a passion that seeing them get anything stuck in their eye makes one's pants feel tighter, but nothing about this is cool. Nothing. Seriously.

I don't care who it is, or what company; sliding in firmware that removes functionality and capability from the user just sucks. It's not the end of the world, and the antichrist isn't walking around with an iPod, but if you're playing the game where you only claim it's evil when the other side is doing it, it's a game you usually end up losing.

*Shrugs*

It all comes back to cool. You rarely stop being cool overnight. It's a gradual thing. A cut here, a word from somewhere there, and then one day you wake up and you're Canada.

Again, this isn't the end of the world, but the U2 iPod was one nail in the was-cool coffin, and it only takes so many before you're just not climbing out.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    December 15, 2004, at 02:12 AM