Running Windows on the Intel Macs

[Nick Jushchyshyn]

Here's the thing.... Windows dominating the PC market (especially the vanilla business area) is a good thing for Apple.

OK, Apple missed the boat, but now that the ship has sailed the "good" thing is there is no danger of anyone considering Apple as holding a monopoly on the market. This means that Apple can develop their HW, OS, and SW to knit together perfectly in a proprietary way. They don't have to share the technology because they don't dominate the computer market.

So those of us using tools like Shake, Motion even Quicktime and Compressor, etc. benefit from performance enhancements and even scripting tools embedded in at the OS level.

Licensing this stuff out means opening the door to supporting all sorts of "unknown" parameters, which mucks up the works and bogs down development ... for which Microsoft is a case study example.

This post comes to you from someone with a 15 year background in MS based IT development and support. :)
Have fun.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Nick Jushchyshyn

the "good" thing is there is no danger of anyone considering Apple as holding a monopoly on the market.

Unless they look at the portable music market where Apple has something as high as an 80% share! Have you been following the issue in France where a new law would require that users have a way to defeat the DRM in iTunes music?

[Nick Jushchyshyn]

Yeah, I saw some articles about it, but haven't seen anything that actually details the law, so I'm reluctant to take a stand on an opinion.
Will be interesting to see what happens.

Technically, I don't think you can say Apple has 80% of the portable music market. CDs and even some cassettes are still sold and are pretty portable. In Nov. '05, RIAA was reporting that sales of digital music downloads was only 4% of the whole music market. It was big news because that was more than double the 1.5% it held a year or so earlier, but still not a "monopoly" on portable music.

The DRM on iTunes does not prevent people from buying CDs (from any French retailer) and digitally moving the music onto any portable playback device they like.

Still, I have no idea how French law and politics works, so I haven't a clue as to what's actually in the proposal, or why it should/shouldn't pass, and/or what affect it would have anywhere else in the world.

Have you seen any sites that dig deeper into these details?

[Boyd Ostroff]

I'm sure there's something with greater depth out there, but this article seems to provide a good summary:

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/...ap2612157.html

Under the bill, companies would be required to reveal the secrets of hitherto-exclusive copy-protection technologies such as Apple's FairPlay format and the ATRAC3 code used by Sony's Connect store and Walkman players.

That could permit consumers for the first time to download music directly to their iPods from stores other than iTunes, or to rival music players from iTunes France.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Although we're wandering off topic, here's a related story about Apple's market share and how it's getting attention from the big media companies

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Stor...oo&siteid=yhoo

Stahlman said it is now difficult for the media industry to not view Apple as a competitor, as the company commands about 75% of the market for legally downloadable music, has sold more than 1 billion songs through iTunes, and continues to sign deals to provide more deals to sell music videos and television show episodes. "There's a growing feeling that Apple isn't the media's best friend," Stahlman said. "The media companies see downloading (content) as the future of their businesses, and they don't like one company holding 70% or 80% of the market share for making that content available."