But reading these articles does raise a question (for me at least): until the cost of building an iPhone reduces to the point that the phone carrier doesn’t need to subsidise the object for it to be affordable for most people, won’t their interest in protecting their call and SMS revenues be manifested in contracts with phone manufacturers to the extent that apps such as Google voice get booted from app stores?

Alternatively, what you could have is an app store which had an authentication process to see whether you paid for the phone outright, or are on a contract which subsidises/finances the cost of the phone. If you’ve bought outright, you can download an app which enables free voice and SMS etc; if you’re on a subsidy/financing plan, you can’t until X months later when the cost of the hardware has been paid off.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/apple-is-growing-rotten-to-the-core-and-its-likely-atts-fault/

It’s poorly regulated capitalism, I grant you (presumably why the French were considering legal action to force Apple to open iTunes to other gadgets, or iPods to other software, I forget which), but it would seem to be the logical conclusion of market capitalism: create a market, then try to dominate it and create barriers to entry for others for as long as possible so you can milk the profits for as long as possible. It’s what MS did with operating systems and word processing software etc. Presumably it’s also where Google is going in the long run, by trying to create a super-attractive offering of inter-operability within its cloud.

You’re right that alternatives do exist, and yet more will be created in the future. You’ve highlighted some and there are – of course – plenty of alternatives in the market for operating systems. But doesn’t that confirm my point: the values underpinning Apple & MS’s kind of capitalism guide them towards making everything as easy as possible for customers to stick with their brand, and as hard as possible to leave. As far as I understand them, the values of FOSS-style capitalism are quite different – about empowering people, enabling them to make intelligent choices. The sort of choices that you might be faced with when booting up a new install of a music storage and playback piece of software, e.g. ‘Do you want you music you rip stored in an open file format for maximum transferrability, or would you prefer to trade-off some of that transferrability for a file format which takes up less hard disk space?’

I think people have become scared of all the ‘choice’ they’re offered, and trade-off flexibility (of Android, Pre, etc) for perceived security and functionality. They may be misperceptions, but they are common enough for Apple et al to exploit.

Anyway… back to work. This was written during a post-lunch brain slowdown, so possibly doesn’t have the greatest intellectual coherence…

BTW transferring files just worked for me. I plugged a USB stick into my MacBook, dragged the files onto it, removed the USB stick, plugged it into a Linux netbook running Ubuntu, and … there were the files. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? YMMV.

I take your points but keep in mind I was talking about the default Apple settings, IOW the ones they intend everyone to use.

It may not be pretty, or intelligent in the long run, but it’s market capitalism.

Umm, it’s exactly the opposite of market capitalism. It relies on monopolistic control of a market segment to extract super normal profits. It is corporate state-ism.

I suspect that if MS had won this battle and Zunes were the dominant player in the market (don’t fall off your chair laughing) people would be writing about the problems of accessing and shifting music stored in WMA format.

It’s not surprising that Apple close off iTunes to non-Apple devices: they make the serious money from flogging iPods, not from distributing bits on behalf of record labels and film companies. At the end of the day a company is going to do what it can to protect its revenue stream. It may not be pretty, or intelligent in the long run, but it’s market capitalism.

I always thought these tools were there to help me get stuff done.