Palm Pre and iTunes: using victimhood to sway opinion
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
The Palm Pre is out and it’s doing well. It will no doubt cut into iPhone sales and for good reason, it’s a well designed new smartphone with a physical keyboard and a great new OS. One feature of the Pre that caught many people’s attention is the fact that it can use Apple’s iTunes to sync music and maybe other types of information. No hardware devices other than Apple’s own iPods and iPhones can do this so the fact that Palm built this kind of compatibility in seemed like a shot across the bow of Apple.
Remember, Jon Rubinstein, the new CEO of Palm was the head of Apple’s hardware division for many years including the years Apple launched the iPod. He had to know that Apple would not be happy about Palm building iTunes compatibility into the Pre and my guess is he knew what Apple might do about it, which is to issue a warning: iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players. No doubt a future version of iTunes will break the Pre’s syncing ability.
Rubinstein had to have set this up knowing what would happen and hoping that public sentiment would swing to Palm because it paints Apple, in some people’s eyes as the evil big brother of digital music as well as digital music players and phones.
He also should have known that Apple has a history of doing things like this and while he was at Apple they never allowed third party digital music players to sync with iTunes. This happened with numerous players and during that time he was on Apple’s side of that argument.
I’m not sure playing the victim will get Palm very far. The Pre seems like a great smartphone and Palm ought to simply do their own iTunes-like software or come up with another system as innovative as their Touchstone charging system.
While Apple does have a lock in this area it’s a lock they’ve earned by building the simplest and most reliable software-hardware connection. I think the design and engineering that went into building that connection is worth protecting and keeping proprietary, even at the cost of losing potential iTunes Music Store sales from Pre owners.
I don’t think palm needs a new software. I think they can simply recommend Songbird which is an open source implementation of iTunes and it works just great.
Dang! Songbird even supports my Zune, just found out. wow!
Songbird looks great Dilip. I’m sure people will use it if they need it. Many people like the iTunes music store as a way to buy music and more so my guess is one of the reasons Palm would like to use iTunes is for its access to the ITMS.