@) 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.
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)
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.