ITunes is Anti-Web
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps.
Apple is a farsighted company, but surely it's a bit much to expect them to have traveled half a decade into the future and brought back Web standards that didn't exist yet. And, let me assure you: Web versions of iTunes built with the technologies of January 2001 were terrible (cough Java applets cough) compared to iTunes. That's not a hypothetical -- lots of people built such apps. They're all forgotten now.
Why, now that things have moved on, doesn't Apple abandon the iTunes model and build a web app?
A) Because iTunes needs to connect to iPods. Can you build a web app that can reach out over the USB ports and talk to an iPod? I'm pretty sure that, if I could, it would be treated as a dire emergency and high-priority patches would be issued. If I can talk to your iPod via JS, I can talk to your hard drives.
Even the Amazon music store communicates with iPods via... iTunes! There are few other ways, and no other sanctioned way.
You could, I suppose, reduce iTunes to a tiny browser plugin or a stub, but that would still require users to download and install a third-party plugin, and it would lead to problem B:
B) Now that iTunes is established with millions of existing iPod owners -- who are Apple's best customers, now that so much of iPod sales are to people replacing existing iPods -- why make a major change in their workflow, with no benefit for them and trivial benefit for the world? The risk of confusing one existing iPod customer may well offset the potential benefit of getting several new music-only customers like Jeff -- who obviously doesn't own an iPod or he wouldn't be complaining.
Plus: Cross-browser maintenance of an app as complex as iTunes is expensive and difficult, you can't control every aspect of the UI, and the population of people who balk at iTunes is small and is unlikely to contain many loyal Apple customers.
Apple is being deliberately constrained from competing with Amazon by the record companies. They've decided to fight Apple's growing control of their industry by manipulating the market, allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s while refusing to give Apple the same terms. The recording industry is playing Amazon off against Apple in a spiteful attempt to maintain more control.
So: Apple can't sell much of their music without DRM, though they know as well as anyone else that DRM is a dead end. Selling DRM tracks through a Web app might not be impossible, but it certainly is difficult, and it's hard to believe it isn't a waste of time when Amazon is there to clean your clock in the marketplace (to say nothing of the P2P elephant in the room). Apple could put up a Web store that sells the DRM-free portion of their catalog while leaving the DRM-hobbled portion in iTunes, but it doesn't take Steve Jobs to see that as a spectacular marketing mistake.
@) iPod is a closed proprietary gadget that can only be accessed using closed proprietary software. If iPod was open and standardized, the rest of your reasons would probably magically disappear.
Or are you arguing that instead, they should have built something using the "open and standardized" components of the day, precluding almost all of the functionality that made it successful?
And I, too, find it funny that people are still arguing for Apple to pursue the business model that its nigh-extinct competitors were already pursuing in 2001 when the iPod came out.
1991 was a sweet year for the iPod and iTunes. I had no issues installing it on MS-DOS 4/Windows 3.1 but had a hard time with corrupted data when connecting it up via centronix cable (I think iTunes also used a dBase III back-end at the time).
:)
But then my teacher took it away... muttering something about "kids these days and their technology from the future"
I'm arguing that Apple wouldn't have to be anti-Web if iPod was more open and allowed any software to connect and exchange content with it. That's against the grain for Apple, I'm sure, but that's their problem, not mine. (And the irony is that I'm typing this on a Mac)
Openness hurts the big boys, so you hardly ever see the big boys pushing for it. Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).
IIRC, Joel Spolsky called this "commoditizing your complement."
I'm not sure what you mean. Google is gradually opening its technology - you see one announcement after another these days.
And here lies the difference between Google and Apple: both benefited from the open-source world big time, except the former contributes back as an acknowledgement, and the latter contributes nothing.
That sure worked out well for IBM in the PC industry. Whereas the folks who specialized in selling closed, proprietary PC operating systems didn't do well at all.
Not that I wouldn't love a completely open music player that provided the same user experience as iTunes and the iPod. But, oddly, despite the existence of lots of cheap MP3 players, the majority of them have a kind of generic, bad design -- and those that don't sell at low enough volumes that they have trouble competing in price with iPods. And their market is fragmented enough that they don't achieve the kind of dominance that -- for example -- leads to podcast pages having a special button just for them, the way many pages have a special "listen with iTunes" button.
(p.s. You're totally right)
The full iTunes application still remains.
FYI Apple already has a web-based "what's hot on iTunes" thing on their site which is more or less just as simple to maintain.
I admit, it would be really, really useful to have a service which provided links to album information and cover art without asking you to download a special application. Perhaps that's why such services predate iTunes by six years, and were originally available as (anybody else remember this?) Gopher sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allmusic
I find it hard to blame Apple for not bothering to reinvent that wheel. What's the profit margin on it? And, for all I know, Apple isn't even contractually allowed to serve up album info and cover art outside of iTunes. Apple has signed a lot of stupid contracts (cough AT&T cough); it's part of the cost of being the ones who drag ancient monopolies kicking and screaming into the future.
Perhaps I wouldn't have misunderstood Atwood if he'd given his essay the proper title: "Why the people I follow on Twitter are anti-web for linking to a non-web resource when AllMusic is just sitting there."
Information about music is marketing material for Apple. They're just doing a poor job of using it. I'm more likely to purchase a song if I can figure out what the iTunes link is pointing to instead of having to install a program first.
- The number of users who post iTunes links.
- The clickthrough rate.
- The number of users who click through on an iTunes link who don't have iTunes already.
- The percentage breakdown of the number of users who will react to the forbidding "you need iTunes" dialog by a) downloading iTunes; b) going away frustrated; c) going away frustrated and writing an angry blog post.
- The difference between the previous data and the data on the number of users who, presented with a nice informative page with a discreet "you can get this at iTunes" link, will a) download iTunes; b) go away happy; c) go away and buy the music from a competitor.
- The approximate value, in dollars gained or lost, of every scenario I just outlined.
- The cost of building and maintaining an additional web app (which, once built, can never be taken down) both in dollars and in loss of focus. Remember that this is Apple: Their general philosophy is to maintain focus by eschewing profitable but low-margin businesses and focusing on a select few high-margin businesses.
- The extent to which the existence of two separate Apple music information sites -- the music store and the Web Thingy -- confuses users and decreases the probability of sales across the entire Apple customer base. This is a hard one to measure, but a good usability lab would enjoy tackling it.
As it happens, I don't know any of these numbers. Apple, however, knows them all to some approximation, provided they have an analytics person on staff. So, when Apple decides to let AllMusic and Amazon have the free-music-information business to themselves, I'm not equipped to second-guess them.
Amazon seemed to do just fine. Apple could have as well. I don't think this was motivated by a desire to have a great UX that couldn't be achieved in browsers at the time (given that iTunes is just a glorified browser)... I think it was a desire to be proprietary (anti-web, if you will).
When you click on a link in the browser it is forwarding the request to a desktop application. Just because the application connects to a remote server and displays html type content does not mean it needs to go in a web browser.
This is classic idealistic programmer blindness.
Examples:
I could write this program and I don't think it's worth $20 so it should be free.
It should be open source.
I can't reprogram my the fuel intake of my car so it must be anti-web.
etc, etc, ...
Is it programmer blindness? The reason I hate it as a programmer is that I don't see any compelling reason for the store to be not on the web. And it is very inconvenient. So it appears to be bad design, which disturbs the harmony of the cosmos.
If the players for web don't live up to Apple's standards, why not improve Safari accordingly?
For Iphone apps it might not make as much sense.
How about some business reasons?
- Don't have to test on multiple browsers. - Can upgrade the browser engine automatically with application updates and tie new features to iTunes version - Less risk of HTML hacking (source is much harder to get to), increases entrance barrier - Long term goal of familiarizing Windows users with a mac style interface.
I am surprised that it is still possible to buy applications for OS X anywhere. Why don't they tie OS X to the iTunes store as well?
In fact, why doesn't Apple just create it's own internet, completely isolated from the real internet?
Edit: one reason I can accept (just barely): pushing apps directly onto the phone if bought in the shop. I still think there should be a way to view the apps available in a browser.
Obviously Apple is doing fine without me as a customer, so what can I say...
however, unless you mean explicitly browsing, in which case i might be inclined to agree because of the iTunes store links that only work in iTunes...that are useless if you don't have iTunes installed.
If Microsoft did this, there would be a swarm of complaints, and rightly so.
I'll stick with the Amazon music store, which is not only cheaper, has no confusing DRM files to deal with, and is fully on the web, meaning I can link to music, buy it on any web-enabled computer, etc.
There are plenty of reasons to like Apple, but their music store seems backward and anti-competitive to me.
help me understand: how do I buy music for a Zune? I went to Zune.net, and this is what I found:
"For the full Zune Music experience, get the free Zune software. Browse over three million songs you can preview and download..."
In Cringely's interview of Steve Jobs from "Revenge of the Nerds", Jobs says that he doesn't begrudge Microsoft their success. It just bothers him that they have absolutely no taste.
I agree that Apple (particularly under Jobs) is no better than Microsoft in terms of wanting to lock in all of their customers and extract as much money from them as humanly possible. However, I do think that Apple (particularly under Jobs) exhibits outstanding taste in software and hardware design. In particular, the combination of iTunes and iPod, while striving to lock customers in and not playing fairly with others, is far more usable and aesthetically pleasing than all of the sorry attempts by Microsoft to solve the same set of problems.
I think the fact that so many people LIKE Apple's products is part of the reason why not as many people get upset at Apple's anti-competitive behavior.
Lots of links on the web are to other applications. like links to flash, pdf, office documents, .dmg disk images to download, files to ftp, ...
The iTunes Music/Movie/Application store is just an egregious example of this because it renders a lot of stuff that looks like it could be rendered in a browser, which is why they use a browser under the hood.
But we could make the same argument about PDF, and the defenders would say that PDF can render things with a UI and a rendering model that surpasses HTML in fidelity, and that its users need that.
And that's the reason iTMS isn't a web site. Apple wants an interaction model that is difficult to render with fidelity in browsers.
We can make something almost as good in a browser, but almost as good isn't what Apple does. It's what Microsoft does, and that's why people for whom Windows is good enough don't understand why iTMS isn't a web site.
At home I'd have to boot my gaming PC so that I can take a peek at the store (lucky I still have a gaming PC instead of a console). It is simply not user friendly.
But I know, Apple is making money with it, so whatever...
But you and Jeff are saying very different things: You said iTMS is annoying because you have a use-case it does not support, whereas he said Apple is Anti-Web because they employ a technique--web links to a proprietary desktop application--that supports a different use case.
I think I can agree with you while disagreeing with the way he frames his argument.
I think the browser/html/http combination are perfectly capable of delivering MP3 files but I guess that's not proprietary enough for Apple.
The trouble of getting the iTunes store onto the web (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242316) would not be worth it because they already have the largest market share in MP3 players AND in MP3 selling.
So I don't think they mind. People can complain all they want, but as long as Apples earning money, they won't be sad about it.
Also, Apple made sure that iPhone apps can ONLY be bought via iTunes. For the iPod you can get your MP3s anywhere.
Why isn't Amazon's "MP3 downloader" completely optional?
Apple is consistently been anti-open everything, and iTunes is another example. Can't use their hardware with other OSes. Can't use their OSes with other hardware. The only reason they opened up the iPhone was because people were vehemently demanding it and were going to open the thing up by themselves if Apple wasn't.
Unless you have some serious browser hacking () kungfu, it takes you to (gasp!!) a desktop email client!
() kungfu measured against general populace, not HN populace.
In all of those cases, end users must use a proprietary application to actually view the content. I clicked on your link and when it opened in iTunes, I saw the same text that Google's spider previewed.
Here is Google's cache:
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:GYFPOvjhhfoJ:itunes.com...
As you can see, the spider saw the full text of the review. The preview in the search page might be some metadata Apple provided as a hint to Google or it may be that Google's spider is really good at extracting interesting sentences :-)
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
x-apple-aka-ttl: Generated Thu Jul 10 08:46:08 PDT 2008,
Expires Thu Jul 10 08:46:08 PDT 2008, TTL 0s
x-apple-application-instance: 6105
x-apple-asset-version: 46436
x-apple-max-age: 0
x-apple-request-store-front: <null>
x-apple-date-generated: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:08 GMT
x-webobjects-loadaverage: 0
Content-Length: 1940
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Expires: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:08 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:08 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
X-Apple-Partner: origin.0
If it is a choice between (a), (b), and (c), which choice would you make if you were a product manager for Apple? Which choice would you make if you were an iPod owner?
I used wget.
You and I have a very different understanding of why Google does and does not ban web sites. They ban web sites for SEO black hattery.
In this case, Apple presents information that people searching Google want to find. Why on Earth would it benefit Google to ban this practice?
Are you equating the iTunes application to some sort of drive-by-download malware? If so, please make that point and not frame this as a violation of Google's quasi terms of service.
Do you think that Google is unaware of what is happening, that Apple is fooling them? Send them an email and let them know how Apple is tricking their spiders.
What Google's policy is, as I understand it, to index information that's openly available to every host with an IP address. Google wants to see the same content as any other host on the Net can see and that's, you know, pretty much in the spirit of the Internet.
Going against these principles means going against the Web and breaking it. Good or bad, designed perfectly or not, and no matter whether the world will become a better place to live thanks to iTunes and Apple, but this is anti-Web.
This is a rant against what he sees as a stupid business practice, but in a business argument of Jeff Atwood vs Steve Jobs, do you even need to know the question before you decide who's right?
If you oppose something (that's you're not even paying for), but it still ends up wildly successful, then the aspect of it that bothered you clearly doesn't bother too many people. You can settle for being a minority.
(note: this isn't Apple fanboyism. This is the same argument I would give to people who complain about Windows, oil companies, pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, etc. If you're a minority opinion, then you have to DEFEAT the thing you hate.)
Yes, I don't have an iPod, but I am inclined to buy an iPhone. So in elections, I guess I would be a swing voter. Seeing nice apps in the store might just swing my vote to the right side (buy). Care or don't care - it is one customer more or less.