I hate to say I told you so, but Apple's worst enemy is... Apple. If you ask me, now that iTunes has been cloned, Apple's future dominance of the Media 2.0 value chain is under fairly serious threat. This is because the complementarity between the iPod and iTunes has effectively been destroyed. ...
[B]y closing off it's platform - by tying iTunes to the iPod - Apple effectively blocked huge amounts of value creation. Much more than the value it might have lost due to imitation. It killed what might have been a vibrant market for complements - plugins, mods, skins, etc - before it even began.
How has iTunes only "now" been cloned? Why does the WinAmp plugin count when third-party apps, plugins for other player software, and code to open the iTunes protocols don't? How has iTunes been cloned when they still run the only iTunes Music Store (and isn't that itself part of "the media industry's eventual, but inevitable, shift from goods to services")?
Is there the same buzz of activity around WMA? Does the lack of a single slick gadget dash interest? Is the iPod-iTunes platform already an open market, in spite of Apple pretending otherwise?
Who makes money off music player plugins and skins? (What's a music player "mod" other than a plugin or skin?) Where's the value proposition in uglifying and sapping the usability of a daemonic-posture application? Is iTunes better because it doesn't look like ass, or is Windows Media Player better because you can choose which flavor of ass it looks like?
Is it more important to let someone make money assifying your music experience than to let musicians make money selling music digitally on the internet?
So is Apple's "value proposition" for iTunes and the iPod somewhere between these issues, or is Apple's lunch eaten, and they merely don't know it yet?
Will I get any work done this morning?
