Linked List: May 7, 2008

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Why Apple Is More Expensive Than Amazon 

Reg Braithwaite on why the music industry has a problem with the iTunes Store’s dominant position:

They want consumers using devices in proprietary silos like old-fashioned cell phones, where you pay for the track, you pay for the bits transferred over the air, and then you pay all over again when you want to use a few seconds of the track as a ring tone.

As soon as they can break this pesky iPod-iTMS-iPhone nonsense, the labels want to get back to dictating what you pay and how often you pay. The labels want to do business with people like Microsoft. Microsoft gets it: all the people who bought music using MSN music? They can buy it all over again at the Zune store.

Microsoft Promised NBC a ‘Copyright Cop’ to Block Non-DRM Video Files 

So why are NBC TV shows now available for the Zune but not for iTunes? Saul Hansell reports:

First, Apple insists that all TV shows have an identical wholesale price so that it can sell all of them at $1.99. NBC wants to sell its programs for whatever price it chooses.

Second, Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos.

Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright “cop” to be installed on its devices.

That sounds like a surefire winner to help the Zune catch up to the iPhone. I can see this both ways, though — perhaps Microsoft has no intention of actually doing this, and they simply conned NBC into an agreement with a fingers-crossed promise to “get right on it”.

Sprint Spending $100 Million to Advertise iPhone Knock-Off 

Mark Wilson reports at Gizmodo:

Starting May 9th, Sprint will begin a massive, $100 million marketing campaign aimed straight at the iPhone’s nether regions. Stacking its [Samsung] Instinct against the iPhone, Sprint hopes to show that EVDO and GPS make their product way better than anything coming out of Cupertino.

They’ve got video of the first two spots. Watch them.

As Wilson writes, it boggles the mind that Sprint is hanging a $100 million dollar advertising campaign on two features — GPS and EVDO networking — that the iPhone is widely-rumored to be picking up in its next-generation hardware. Worse, side-by-side, even in commercials commissioned by Sprint, the Instinct looks like crap next to an iPhone — the screen is way smaller and way less bright.

What’s clear is that Sprint is run by MBA-trained executives who see everything as a general “business” problem. In their minds, the same things apply to selling phones as toothpaste. How about this idea: Take $100 million and use it to design a better phone?

When the Fall Is All That’s Left 

Mark Pilgrim on Mozilla’s “we’ll just stay on the sidelines” attitude toward the Acid 3 test.

Hillary and Bill: The Movie 

You’re aware that Roger Ebert is now writing a weblog for the Sun-Times, that it’s about whatever is on his mind, and that it’s excellent, right?

A Short Review of Times for Mac 

Ian Beck reviews the new mimic-the-look-of-a-newspaper RSS reader Times:

All of my feeds fit neatly into one of two categories: feeds whose headlines I skim, and feeds where I read every headline and often read every article. NetNewsWire is great for the former category; Times is perfect for the latter (minor bugs notwithstanding).