Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
As the argument seemingly rages between Apple's Steve Jobs and the four major record companies about removing digital rights management (DRM) restrictions from downloaded music, some facts seem to have been conveniently forgotten.
Fact number one is that the iPod was launched in
2001, two years before the April 2003 launch of iTunes in the US and
later launch elsewhere. Prior to the launch of iTunes, sales of the
iPod were not exactly shooting through the stratosphere as they are
now. Apple was a late comer to a very crowded market.
Pundits and Jobs who point to the fact that only 2 billion songs have
been downloaded to iPods - an average of about 20 per iPod sold -
ignore the fact that every single one of those songs were destined for
just one brand of device - an iPod.
Fact number two is that Jobs, now the champion of DRM-free music, has
until recently been a very vocal opponent of European efforts to force
Apple to make iTunes downloads interoperable with other players and
iPods interoperable with downloads from other online stores. He claimed
it would encourage piracy.
If Jobs really does believe in DRM free music and is totally opposed to
the pro-DRM stance of the record companies then why not, as an interim
step immediately license FairPlay to other music player manufacturers?
Why not make iPods compatible with PlaysForSure and Zune DRM?
The same questions could be asked of Bill Gates and Microsoft, who have craftily copied the Apple model with the Zune player.
Let's get serious here. The current situation is that if you happen to
be an iTunes user, you're going to also be an iPod owner. And if you're
an iPod owner, you're most likely going to be an iTunes user. Does
anyone seriously believe that Steve Jobs wants to change
that?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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