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Following up on yesterday's articles about the move of iPod competitors in the direction of integration of hardware and content, Nicholas Carr's RoughType has a long meditation on how and why this movement goes against the general rule that:
Complex technologies tend to evolve from proprietary "integrated architectures" to open "modular architectures" as they mature. An integrated architecture, controlled by a single company, is necessary to make a new technology perform well enough to be embraced by customers. But when the performance of the technology becomes "good enough" for the general market, a modular architecture takes over, as it enables lower cost production and greater flexibility and also allows many companies to contribute innovations. Carr suggests:
I think what it shows is that the advantages of standardization may be overrated, at least in certain consumer markets. Given the existing standards in computer hardware combined with today's flexible global supply chains, a single company, like Apple, may be able to design a proprietary system that is modular enough to counter most of the benefits of open systems while also maintaining the performance advantage that a closed system can provide. I think there is another explanation -- for practical purposes, the iPod is an open system, called P2P and CD transfer. Apple has sold over 60 million iPods, the biggest of which holds 80GB. A song track requires about 4MB. iTunes has sold something over a billion songs. Do a little mutliplication and you realize that iTunes is supplying very little of the music content of the nation's iPod stock. Most of it is either transferred CDs or (shudder) P2P. Of course, people use iPods for personal stuff, too, which makes all estimates suspect, but the basics are clear.
In this world, the ability to interoperate is very small potatoes; the iPod's superior features have won hands down.
In the longer term, though, the iPod'/iTune dominance seems improbable. In a world in which content is actually purchased rather than lifted or transferred from other media, the subscription models -- $12 a month for access to an infinite library -- seem a far better value that the $0.99 per song download, and it is difficult to believe that consumers will not ultimately be moved in this direction. Apple could also play this game, of course, but however it works out, it wouild make the interoperability issue largely moot.
posted by James DeLong @ 10:53 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation
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