« September 1, 2006 | Main | September 3, 2006 »
September 2, 2006
"Taking aim at parts of the iTunes-plus-iPod system, now that it has become a de facto standard, is unlikely to work," Richard Waters writes today, in a column on challenges to Apple's dominance in digital music. "History shows that technology leaders, once established, are seldom dethroned by direct competition. It usually takes a shift in business model, or in a technology paradigm, before that happens."
Another day, another "direct challenge." Drawing on a story broken by Reuters, Pete Cashmore writes that "in a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes, MySpace has announced its intention to sell songs from the 3 million unsigned bands on MySpace.com." That's great news for the unsigned bands, but it's premature to call it a big threat to iTunes. In a comment on Cashmore's post, Ivan Pope puts the MySpace move in context: "I don’t see in any way that selling music from ‘3 million unsigned bands’ challenges Apple and the iPod. I mean, no DRM is great, but Apple is not about selling unsigned bands. And most of us aren’t about buying unsigned bands."
On Slashdot, chief wikipedian Jimmy Wales takes pains to argue that a new Wikipedia plan to have administrators vet page edits before posting them on the public site will make the online encyclopedia "more wiki than ever." Another Slashdot writer takes a different view: "This is a major shift, from a 'publish and fix' policy to one of prior restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what appears."
Posted by nick at September 2, 2006 12:46 AM