waffle

From a Newsweek interview with Steve Jobs: (emphasis mine)

Q: At one point you were saying, “When our customers demand it, that’s when we’ll consider interoperability.”
A: Nobody’s ever demanded it. People know up front that when they buy music from the iTunes music store it plays on iPods, and so we’re not trying to hide anything there.

You hear that, everyone? We never demanded it. All those wild discussions, all those Winamp plugins, all those alternative OSes, all those DRM workarounds, completely ignored, because customers of well over 50 million iPods never demanded interoperability.

What pains me is that Apple has already won. They could go for interoperability now and still win, maybe win even more, because having products as good as iTunes and iPod support other formats is a customer magnet. I want to use OGG Vorbis, FLAC, DivX, Windows Media. I want iTunes to speak your crazy moon language. But most of all, I want Apple to acknowledge that I want that, beyond hiding icons.

[Cartoon depiction abstract: One object circling another really really fast. The fast object is labelled B and depicts the average glacier. The slow object is labelled A and depicts bank transfers to PayPal accounts.]

[The caption, as if spoken by object B:] “Ha! I’m still faster than you!”

So: Intel says at a media exhibition that it’s okay for Apple to not be open.

Excuse me while I’ll chow this down. Intel is pushing Viiv, a platform whose media vending is based on Windows Media, a closed format in all its varieties. Out of Apple’s entire platform, I can point out only three closed formats of any magnitude whatsoever: the FairPlay DRM (and it not being licensed for other companies; Apple is not alone in doing this), the DAAP protocol for iTunes music sharing and the Apple Lossless codec. Literally everything else - bar internal databases - is open, and the DAAP protocol is being “licensed” for other vendors.

Media? MPEG-1 (MP3 means MPEG-1 Part 3 audio encoding) or MPEG-4. Both open. AAC? MPEG-4 audio codec. Open. H.264? MPEG-4 video codec. Open. Bonjour/Zeroconf, that iTunes uses for discovery of shared libraries and remote speakers? Invented by Apple, and not only open but open source.

That Apple means “closed” is these days largely a myth. (I mean, compare the number of totally proprietary ports on a 1996 Power Mac and a 2006 Mac Pro.) Would I like to see more formats supported in iTunes? Yes, sure, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, maybe even WMA/WMV. But Viiv is not more open than iTunes, unless “open” means “widely licensed to a bunch of box makers while building on closed formats from Microsoft”.

Halo-style.