Killing two worms in the Apple…
I don’t know about you, but my love for animals, tame or wild, stops with worms in my apple. Hence the title; it describes two cases where the tech giant Apple was stopped cold. Both these are wins for indie artists and negative publicity for this monster of the corporate world.
The little company that started in the garage was never one of my favorites. In the beginning, Apple computers were just toys. We taught high school teachers from the Colombian provinces about computing using early Apples with mixed results (the course was based on our book, La Revolucion Informatica en la Educacion—not available in the U.S.)—they learned, though, in spite of the machines’ limitations. If you wanted to do any real computing work back then, you used a DEC, Cray, or CDC machine. Even the early MS DOS PCs were more powerful.
The old toasters, still toys, had some success because Apple “borrowed” a GUI from Xerox; the little boxes practically created point-and-click and user friendly, albeit limited, computing experience compared to the command line-based interfaces of the other computers I mentioned. One paid dearly for that ease of use, though, and not until Apple put that GUI on top of UNIX did you get anything close to a powerful computer (the success of the various versions of LINUX with their own GUIs might have had something to do with that change).
If not inferior, Apple products have always been overpriced. Right now a Samsung S5 is a better buy for both price and features than the Apple iPhone (I can see the tomatoes flying at me from Apple addicts). Moreover, the Android operating system also beats Apple’s. Bridges not connecting with roads brought Apple’s many software limitations to the fore. Yet the behemoth marches on.
One reason for Apple’s success is market savvy. Unfortunately, in at least two recent cases, a better name for that is media control. I’m not talking about TV and newspapers either or their snazzy looking devices. They’ve always controlled software developers, for example. Where PC software developers have to be clever enough to make all sorts of devices and brands work together, Apple has chosen the easy road of making all their own hardware and has used that to put straitjackets on software developers. Software is media. But so are music and books. It’s taken me a long time to move along nostalgia road, but that’s my subject today—Apple’s attempts to control the music and book businesses.
When Jobs invented the so-called agency model, where suppliers (publishers) would control prices of ebooks (the media), not the retailers (Amazon was the target), the Justice Department took action. Traditional publishers caved early (although the Amazon v. Hachette controversy was one later fall-out). Arrogant Apple slogged on by mounting an appeal.
But just last week, they lost their case in appeals court. It was kind of hard to argue Apple’s case because Jobs’ own words were the smoking gun. Writing about the illegal contracts negotiated with publishers, he wrote: “I can live with this, as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for [during] the first year. If they don’t, I’m not sure we can be competitive.”
Last week Apple lost another battle, this time in the court of public opinion. In their roll-out of their music service, Apple wanted a three-month trial period where they’d pay NOTHING to musicians. Taylor Swift Ltd. stepped in and said no way and recording artists backed her up, so Apple caved. Arrogance isn’t a sound corporate strategy, it seems, but it’s Apple’s most important product.
The first case, basically price-fixing, was an Apple attack on another corporate giant, Amazon. As an online book retailer, Amazon has every right to set its own prices, but Apple didn’t see it that way and convinced the Big Five to go along. Apple AKA Jobs offered the publishers the agency model to increase their AKA Jobs’ own profits on ebook sales, a bit of old-fashioned mafia protectionism (Jobs as the godfather) where Apple planned to take its cut. Amazon wasn’t affected by the music case as far as I know, but Amazon Prime is certainly a competitor.
The NY Times carried both stories. Of course, because the Times has a long standing campaign of attacking Amazon, and that’s what Apple was really doing, the paper used more page space for the Taylor Swift story. “Smart young singer takes on Apple” is a better story than “Amazon wins one against Apple,” from the Times’ viewpoint. After all, that paper is a traditional publisher—maybe not of books, but certainly part of the bloated publishing bureaucracy nonetheless—so they gleefully attack Amazon whenever they can but don’t publicize it when Amazon wins a battle.
But the music and book cases have a common element: Apple was in effect attacking the real creators of media—musicians, lyricists, and book authors. Traditional book publishing has always supported its bloated bureaucracy on the backs of authors, so Apple was just following the road most traveled there. But Swift Ltd. was quick to recognize that artists who create in the music industry would also suffer. In contrast to bestselling authors like Child, Patterson, and Preston, she stood up for the little guy, recognizing she stood to lose as well. (That might make the authors named seem stupid and Taylor Swift very smart, by the way, but you can decide that.)
I suppose the entertainment industry—books are entertainment, after all—is bound to end up in the same place as other industries where suppliers of raw materials (musicians and writers) make very little, consumers are stuck with high prices, and all the middle people make a good living while creating absolutely nothing. That’s not what indie musicians and indie writers want, of course—they don’t want stifling, greedy bureaucracy to stand between them and their public, and they do deserve a decent living.
Apple is so big now that it steps all over the little guy. It’s a lumbering brontosaurus that squishes the creative little mammal under its feet without any concern whatsoever. It’s time for Apple to realize, though, that the little guys have made them rich, all the way back to those old Apple computers coming out of that Silicon Valley garage. They have lost sight of that. That is their arrogance. That will be their downfall.
And so it goes….
