Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [86]
Whatever their origins, Jobs’s control-freak tendencies are the stuff of legend. In the early days of Apple, Jobs fought with his friend and cofounder, Steve Wozniak, who strongly advo cated open, accessible machines. Wozniak, the ultimate hacker’s hacker, wanted computers that were easy to open and adapt. Jobs wanted the precise opposite: machines that were locked shut and impossible to modify. The first Macs, which Jobs oversaw mostly without Wozniak’s help, were tightly sealed with special screws that could be loosened only with a proprietary foot-long screwdriver.
More recently, critics said barring third-party software on the iPhone was a critical mistake. It would cost the iPhone its killer app—the crucial piece of software that would make it a must-have device. In the history of the PC, successful hardware has often been determined by an exclusive piece of software: VisiCalc on the Apple II, Aldus Pagemaker and desktop publishing on the Mac, Halo on the Xbox.
Jobs’s strategy of keeping the iPod/iTunes ecosystem closed to partners was also seen by pundits as another example of his desire to maintain complete control. Critics have argued that Jobs should license iTunes to competitors, which would allow songs bought online from the iTunes music store to be played on MP3 players made by other manufacturers. As it is, songs bought from iTunes can be played only on iPods because of copy protection code attached to song files, known as digital rights management, or DRM.
Others have argued that Jobs should do the opposite: open the iPod to Microsoft’s competing Windows Media format. WMA is the default file format for music files on Windows PCs. CDs ripped on a Windows PC, or bought from an online store like Napster or Virgin Digital, are usually encoded as WMA files. (The iPod and iTunes currently import WMA files and convert them to the iPod’s format of choice: AAC.)
Predictably, some critics argued that Jobs’s refusal to open the iPod or iTunes to Microsoft’s formats or outside partners was because of Jobs’s deep-seated need to maintain absolute control. Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of RealNetworks, which operates the rival Rhapsody music service, told the New York Times that Jobs was sacrificing commercial logic in the name of “ideology.” Speaking in 2003, Glaser said: “It’s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market. . . . The history of the world is that hybridization yields better results.”2
Glaser and other critics could see a clear parallel to the Windows versus Mac war of old: Apple’s refusal to license the Mac cost the company its massive early lead in the computer market. While Microsoft licensed its operating system to all comers and quickly grew to a dominant position, Apple kept its toys to itself. Even though the Mac was much more advanced than Windows, it was doomed to a tiny sliver of the market.
Some critics have argued that the same thing would happen with the iPod and iTunes, that Jobs’s refusal to play nice with others would result in Apple’s getting the same trouncing in digital music that it received in the PC business. Observers argued that eventually an open system licensed to all comers, like Microsoft’s PlaysForSure, which was adopted by dozens of online music stores and manufacturers of MP3 players, would trump Apple’s go-it-alone approach. Critics said Apple would be faced with the fierce competition that naturally arises from an open market. Competing manufacturers, trying to outdo one another on price and features, would constantly drive down prices while improving their devices.
Apple, on the other hand, would be locked into its own cuckoo land of expensive