Yeah, iTunes is "anti-web", by the enlightened standards of 2008.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps.
Apple is a farsighted company, but surely it's a bit much to expect them to have traveled half a decade into the future and brought back Web standards that didn't exist yet. And, let me assure you: Web versions of iTunes built with the technologies of January 2001 were terrible (cough Java applets cough) compared to iTunes. That's not a hypothetical -- lots of people built such apps. They're all forgotten now.
Why, now that things have moved on, doesn't Apple abandon the iTunes model and build a web app?
A) Because iTunes needs to connect to iPods. Can you build a web app that can reach out over the USB ports and talk to an iPod? I'm pretty sure that, if I could, it would be treated as a dire emergency and high-priority patches would be issued. If I can talk to your iPod via JS, I can talk to your hard drives.
Even the Amazon music store communicates with iPods via... iTunes! There are few other ways, and no other sanctioned way.
You could, I suppose, reduce iTunes to a tiny browser plugin or a stub, but that would still require users to download and install a third-party plugin, and it would lead to problem B:
B) Now that iTunes is established with millions of existing iPod owners -- who are Apple's best customers, now that so much of iPod sales are to people replacing existing iPods -- why make a major change in their workflow, with no benefit for them and trivial benefit for the world? The risk of confusing one existing iPod customer may well offset the potential benefit of getting several new music-only customers like Jeff -- who obviously doesn't own an iPod or he wouldn't be complaining.
Plus: Cross-browser maintenance of an app as complex as iTunes is expensive and difficult, you can't control every aspect of the UI, and the population of people who balk at iTunes is small and is unlikely to contain many loyal Apple customers.
Oh, and I left out Big Reason C, perhaps the biggest reason of all: Apple doesn't build a web app to sell music because several of their big recording company contracts don't let them sell DRM-free music.
Apple is being deliberately constrained from competing with Amazon by the record companies. They've decided to fight Apple's growing control of their industry by manipulating the market, allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s while refusing to give Apple the same terms. The recording industry is playing Amazon off against Apple in a spiteful attempt to maintain more control.
So: Apple can't sell much of their music without DRM, though they know as well as anyone else that DRM is a dead end. Selling DRM tracks through a Web app might not be impossible, but it certainly is difficult, and it's hard to believe it isn't a waste of time when Amazon is there to clean your clock in the marketplace (to say nothing of the P2P elephant in the room). Apple could put up a Web store that sells the DRM-free portion of their catalog while leaving the DRM-hobbled portion in iTunes, but it doesn't take Steve Jobs to see that as a spectacular marketing mistake.
You're missing the entire point. ALL that needs to be displayed is a page with some album art, a description of the thing, and a "Want this? Download iTunes!" button. Then Jeff Atwood can figure out what the heck he just clicked on in Twitter.
The full iTunes application still remains.
FYI Apple already has a web-based "what's hot on iTunes" thing on their site which is more or less just as simple to maintain.
Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer.
I admit, it would be really, really useful to have a service which provided links to album information and cover art without asking you to download a special application. Perhaps that's why such services predate iTunes by six years, and were originally available as (anybody else remember this?) Gopher sites:
I find it hard to blame Apple for not bothering to reinvent that wheel. What's the profit margin on it? And, for all I know, Apple isn't even contractually allowed to serve up album info and cover art outside of iTunes. Apple has signed a lot of stupid contracts (cough AT&T cough); it's part of the cost of being the ones who drag ancient monopolies kicking and screaming into the future.
Perhaps I wouldn't have misunderstood Atwood if he'd given his essay the proper title: "Why the people I follow on Twitter are anti-web for linking to a non-web resource when AllMusic is just sitting there."
"Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer."
Information about music is marketing material for Apple. They're just doing a poor job of using it. I'm more likely to purchase a song if I can figure out what the iTunes link is pointing to instead of having to install a program first.
Your argument is fine and it could be absolutely true... provided the numbers back it up. What numbers do we need?
- The number of users who post iTunes links.
- The clickthrough rate.
- The number of users who click through on an iTunes link who don't have iTunes already.
- The percentage breakdown of the number of users who will react to the forbidding "you need iTunes" dialog by a) downloading iTunes; b) going away frustrated; c) going away frustrated and writing an angry blog post.
- The difference between the previous data and the data on the number of users who, presented with a nice informative page with a discreet "you can get this at iTunes" link, will a) download iTunes; b) go away happy; c) go away and buy the music from a competitor.
- The approximate value, in dollars gained or lost, of every scenario I just outlined.
- The cost of building and maintaining an additional web app (which, once built, can never be taken down) both in dollars and in loss of focus. Remember that this is Apple: Their general philosophy is to maintain focus by eschewing profitable but low-margin businesses and focusing on a select few high-margin businesses.
- The extent to which the existence of two separate Apple music information sites -- the music store and the Web Thingy -- confuses users and decreases the probability of sales across the entire Apple customer base. This is a hard one to measure, but a good usability lab would enjoy tackling it.
As it happens, I don't know any of these numbers. Apple, however, knows them all to some approximation, provided they have an analytics person on staff. So, when Apple decides to let AllMusic and Amazon have the free-music-information business to themselves, I'm not equipped to second-guess them.
Reinventing the wheel, in this case, could be seen as a way to direct traffic to a profitable business. Being the central point for people investigating or sharing information about music on web seems like it might possibly have some value too. As you said, maybe it is a business Apple is contractually precluded from entering. If it isn't, it would seem Apple could fairly easily leverage their existing resources to create it. As was implied by other posters, perhaps they are not because they do not wish to dilute the iTunes channel.
Then there's reason @ (@ comes before the letter A, right?) -
@) iPod is a closed proprietary gadget that can only be accessed using closed proprietary software. If iPod was open and standardized, the rest of your reasons would probably magically disappear.
Ah, you mean that Apple should release a system based on completely open standards, so that it can be easily cloned by former employees of Apple's own Chinese manufacturing partners and brought to market at a lower price? A process which, when iterated, will eventually shave margins down to razor-thin levels, lead to an erosion of good design and the proliferation of generic, bad design, and threaten to drive Apple out of its own industry?
That sure worked out well for IBM in the PC industry. Whereas the folks who specialized in selling closed, proprietary PC operating systems didn't do well at all.
Not that I wouldn't love a completely open music player that provided the same user experience as iTunes and the iPod. But, oddly, despite the existence of lots of cheap MP3 players, the majority of them have a kind of generic, bad design -- and those that don't sell at low enough volumes that they have trouble competing in price with iPods. And their market is fragmented enough that they don't achieve the kind of dominance that -- for example -- leads to podcast pages having a special button just for them, the way many pages have a special "listen with iTunes" button.
I don't understand. If iPod was "open and standardized" in 1991, how would Apple have built an iTunes Music Store that would have provided the same experience?
Or are you arguing that instead, they should have built something using the "open and standardized" components of the day, precluding almost all of the functionality that made it successful?
1991 was a sweet year for the iPod and iTunes. I had no issues installing it on MS-DOS 4/Windows 3.1 but had a hard time with corrupted data when connecting it up via centronix cable (I think iTunes also used a dBase III back-end at the time).
And I, too, find it funny that people are still arguing for Apple to pursue the business model that its nigh-extinct competitors were already pursuing in 2001 when the iPod came out.
Not the gadget itself, but rather access to it. iPod/iTunes is an isolated system designed to lock you in, which makes sense from the business point of view, is legal, gives more confidence to content providers and after all, is beneficial to the company. That's OK.
I'm arguing that Apple wouldn't have to be anti-Web if iPod was more open and allowed any software to connect and exchange content with it. That's against the grain for Apple, I'm sure, but that's their problem, not mine. (And the irony is that I'm typing this on a Mac)
How is that against the grain for Apple? Apple is known for design and quality but I never thought of them as especially open. Sure, they argued for openness where it served them as a 3% player in the OS space, but now that they're a 70+% player in music, more openness would hurt them.
Openness hurts the big boys, so you hardly ever see the big boys pushing for it. Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).
> Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).
IIRC, Joel Spolsky called this "commoditizing your complement."
Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web
I'm not sure what you mean. Google is gradually opening its technology - you see one announcement after another these days.
And here lies the difference between Google and Apple: both benefited from the open-source world big time, except the former contributes back as an acknowledgement, and the latter contributes nothing.
"It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps."
Amazon seemed to do just fine. Apple could have as well. I don't think this was motivated by a desire to have a great UX that couldn't be achieved in browsers at the time (given that iTunes is just a glorified browser)... I think it was a desire to be proprietary (anti-web, if you will).
Saying that iTunes is anti-web is like saying that any desktop application is anti-web.
When you click on a link in the browser it is forwarding the request to a desktop application. Just because the application connects to a remote server and displays html type content does not mean it needs to go in a web browser.
This is classic idealistic programmer blindness.
Examples:
I could write this program and I don't think it's worth $20 so it should be free.
It should be open source.
I can't reprogram my the fuel intake of my car so it must be anti-web.
If Microsoft did this, there would be a swarm of complaints, and rightly so.
I'll stick with the Amazon music store, which is not only cheaper, has no confusing DRM files to deal with, and is fully on the web, meaning I can link to music, buy it on any web-enabled computer, etc.
There are plenty of reasons to like Apple, but their music store seems backward and anti-competitive to me.
"If Microsoft did this, there would be a swarm of complaints, and rightly so."
In Cringely's interview of Steve Jobs from "Revenge of the Nerds", Jobs says that he doesn't begrudge Microsoft their success. It just bothers him that they have absolutely no taste.
I agree that Apple (particularly under Jobs) is no better than Microsoft in terms of wanting to lock in all of their customers and extract as much money from them as humanly possible. However, I do think that Apple (particularly under Jobs) exhibits outstanding taste in software and hardware design. In particular, the combination of iTunes and iPod, while striving to lock customers in and not playing fairly with others, is far more usable and aesthetically pleasing than all of the sorry attempts by Microsoft to solve the same set of problems.
I think the fact that so many people LIKE Apple's products is part of the reason why not as many people get upset at Apple's anti-competitive behavior.
OK, so I'll say it: any desktop application is anti-web.
Is it programmer blindness? The reason I hate it as a programmer is that I don't see any compelling reason for the store to be not on the web. And it is very inconvenient. So it appears to be bad design, which disturbs the harmony of the cosmos.
- Don't have to test on multiple browsers.
- Can upgrade the browser engine automatically with application updates and tie new features to iTunes version
- Less risk of HTML hacking (source is much harder to get to), increases entrance barrier
- Long term goal of familiarizing Windows users with a mac style interface.
Let them use iTunes for that, why not. But why not let me browse the selection on the web. I think you can also buy the stuff directly from the phone once you have one.
How about because you're not their target market? Businesses exist for profit, and their resources are not unlimited, they clearly put their efforts into their customers, you know, the ones with iPods for whom iTunes exists. Their business is rocking, they have no need to chase you.
but the thing is, that's a huge hassle. buying on a website, syncing in an app. what i really like about iTunes is how it's very tightly integrated with everything I use iTunes with/for. no webapp will be able to pull that off.
however, unless you mean explicitly browsing, in which case i might be inclined to agree because of the iTunes store links that only work in iTunes...that are useless if you don't have iTunes installed.
<irony>I guess web applications were the wrong approach all this time.</irony>
I am surprised that it is still possible to buy applications for OS X anywhere. Why don't they tie OS X to the iTunes store as well?
In fact, why doesn't Apple just create it's own internet, completely isolated from the real internet?
Edit: one reason I can accept (just barely): pushing apps directly onto the phone if bought in the shop. I still think there should be a way to view the apps available in a browser.
i admit I only use Itunes for music/video.. and it is convenient to buy and then automatically be in my library where I can fire it up quick or export it to my ipod.
I have nothing against the convenience, I am just surprised they do it that way. I would have thought that basically iTunes integrates a browser for the shop, with some "plugins". So you could have the best of both worlds. If you want to just browse, you can do it with a normal browser, if you want the convenience, use the iTunes browser.
Maybe it is anti-web, but its leveraging the internet in what it does. We have created some hybrid apps that work really well - we have the power of the desktop (for what we do) and the connectivity of the internet (not web) for delivering a better service. I don't like how iTunes works, but I do like what they have been good at which is pioneering the service they have. I also use it for renting movies, which is a great service. At the end of the day Apple is a business - most of us are on here because we're looking at, interested in or running startup businesses and if we had a great idea that took off similar to iTunes I'm sure we wouldn't be so negative towards our own invention.
Typical "Apple is against freedom" linkbait from someone drenched in the Windows ecosystem. That being said...
Lots of links on the web are to other applications.
like links to flash, pdf, office documents, .dmg disk images to download, files to ftp, ...
The iTunes Music/Movie/Application store is just an egregious example of this because it renders a lot of stuff that looks like it could be rendered in a browser, which is why they use a browser under the hood.
But we could make the same argument about PDF, and the defenders would say that PDF can render things with a UI and a rendering model that surpasses HTML in fidelity, and that its users need that.
And that's the reason iTMS isn't a web site. Apple wants an interaction model that is difficult to render with fidelity in browsers.
We can make something almost as good in a browser, but almost as good isn't what Apple does. It's what Microsoft does, and that's why people for whom Windows is good enough don't understand why iTMS isn't a web site.
The annoyance is not that "Apple is against freedom", it is that I can not check what is on offer at the store right now.
At home I'd have to boot my gaming PC so that I can take a peek at the store (lucky I still have a gaming PC instead of a console). It is simply not user friendly.
But I know, Apple is making money with it, so whatever...
I sympathize with you greatly, and you'll notice that on my own blog I promote Amazon books and music.
But you and Jeff are saying very different things: You said iTMS is annoying because you have a use-case it does not support, whereas he said Apple is Anti-Web because they employ a technique--web links to a proprietary desktop application--that supports a different use case.
I think I can agree with you while disagreeing with the way he frames his argument.
100% agree. I hate that iTunes store. I'd really like to legally buy an MP3 for my wife's Creative Zen and yet I have to install iTunes? Hell, I can't even see if they stock the track. Nah, don't think I'll bother thank you very much. I'll go and buy the CD from Amazon.
I think the browser/html/http combination are perfectly capable of delivering MP3 files but I guess that's not proprietary enough for Apple.
I think Apple is okay with Creative Zen owners not buying MP3s from them. They're only targeting iPhone/iPod owners, which has by far the largest market share.
The trouble of getting the iTunes store onto the web (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242316) would not be worth it because they already have the largest market share in MP3 players AND in MP3 selling.
So I don't think they mind. People can complain all they want, but as long as Apples earning money, they won't be sad about it.
I guess it depends whether the iTunes music store is about selling music or just selling music to ipod owners. Obviously, Apple's priority is the latter (understandably from a business / monopoly point of view). However, if the iPod/iTunes combination didn't feel like such a lock-in (i.e, if the online music store, software and hardware could operate independently), I might easily be persuaded to drink the Apple juice.
I use Ubuntu as well, doesn't prevent me from using my iPod. Besides, if you use Linux, you're such a small part of the market Apple doesn't need to care about you. Windows and Mac users are the low hanging fruit.
I agree, it is. iTunes would be nothing without the iPod. It's not even that great a piece of software, and it never was, even prior to when Apple bought it.
Apple is consistently been anti-open everything, and iTunes is another example. Can't use their hardware with other OSes. Can't use their OSes with other hardware. The only reason they opened up the iPhone was because people were vehemently demanding it and were going to open the thing up by themselves if Apple wasn't.
How is that different from Google reaching into PDF documents, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or Flash applications?
In all of those cases, end users must use a proprietary application to actually view the content. I clicked on your link and when it opened in iTunes, I saw the same text that Google's spider previewed.
As you can see, the spider saw the full text of the review. The preview in the search page might be some metadata Apple provided as a hint to Google or it may be that Google's spider is really good at extracting interesting sentences :-)
Have you used iTMS? It does a bunch of stuff not handled by any browser without proprietary plug-ins. So either (a) they have to cut functionality, (b) they have to give you one or more proprietary plug-ins to give you the same functionality in another browser, or (c) provide an application that is also a site-specific web browser, which is what they have done with iTunes.
If it is a choice between (a), (b), and (c), which choice would you make if you were a product manager for Apple? Which choice would you make if you were an iPod owner?
raganwald, the only problem here is, that page does not require Google to use iTunes software for viewing the content. This alone is sufficient for banning the web site and removing it from Google's indexes.
"Banning the web site and removing it from Google's indexes."
You and I have a very different understanding of why Google does and does not ban web sites. They ban web sites for SEO black hattery.
In this case, Apple presents information that people searching Google want to find. Why on Earth would it benefit Google to ban this practice?
Are you equating the iTunes application to some sort of drive-by-download malware? If so, please make that point and not frame this as a violation of Google's quasi terms of service.
Do you think that Google is unaware of what is happening, that Apple is fooling them? Send them an email and let them know how Apple is tricking their spiders.
Of course I'm not going to fight the windmills, and sure Google is aware what's happening.
What Google's policy is, as I understand it, to index information that's openly available to every host with an IP address. Google wants to see the same content as any other host on the Net can see and that's, you know, pretty much in the spirit of the Internet.
Going against these principles means going against the Web and breaking it. Good or bad, designed perfectly or not, and no matter whether the world will become a better place to live thanks to iTunes and Apple, but this is anti-Web.
I think you meant "scan", not "ban"? I was wondering about that, because the marketing of my iPhone app would not be very far reaching if it could not even be found by Google.
I mean "ban". Google requires that all pages make no distinction between the indexer and ordinary browsers and should return same data to both. In the case of that link I gave or any other link to itunes.com, what you see doesn't look the same as what Google sees (see Cached). They have the right to ban the site, I think.
Actually, I think that is the same thing that you would get in the iTunes store if you could see the raw XML. So what distinction does it make, exactly?
The problem is, that page doesn't require Google to use iTunes for viewing its contents. In fact, as you can see the output of wget from my other comment, iTunes tricks both Google and us by sending Content-type: text/html.
Well Jeff, I understand you have a right to be upset at the value you got for all the money you gave Apple for that info.
This is a rant against what he sees as a stupid business practice, but in a business argument of Jeff Atwood vs Steve Jobs, do you even need to know the question before you decide who's right?
OK, if you disagree, let's compare how the iTunes-only viewing has limited Apple's market share in music sales so far. Not too much. Then let's check back in 6 months or a year to see if iTunes and the App Store have bombed. Doubtful.
If you oppose something (that's you're not even paying for), but it still ends up wildly successful, then the aspect of it that bothered you clearly doesn't bother too many people. You can settle for being a minority.
(note: this isn't Apple fanboyism. This is the same argument I would give to people who complain about Windows, oil companies, pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, etc. If you're a minority opinion, then you have to DEFEAT the thing you hate.)
I guess if Apple was a presidential candidate, they would be fighting nails and teeth for every single vote, instead of saying "we don't care about you".
Yes, I don't have an iPod, but I am inclined to buy an iPhone. So in elections, I guess I would be a swing voter. Seeing nice apps in the store might just swing my vote to the right side (buy). Care or don't care - it is one customer more or less.
so now that Apple has the best music organization program out there, people can only complain about it. I remember back in 1999, when I began to listen to MP3's, we used a program on the PC that was a major pain in the ass, but it was the one popular program so we dealt with it. iTunes works well for me, it's easy to get, and it does pretty much whatever you want it to. Don't buy music from the iTunes store if you don't want compressed AAC files, rip your own CDs to your iTunes with the Apple lossless compressed format.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps.
Apple is a farsighted company, but surely it's a bit much to expect them to have traveled half a decade into the future and brought back Web standards that didn't exist yet. And, let me assure you: Web versions of iTunes built with the technologies of January 2001 were terrible (cough Java applets cough) compared to iTunes. That's not a hypothetical -- lots of people built such apps. They're all forgotten now.
Why, now that things have moved on, doesn't Apple abandon the iTunes model and build a web app?
A) Because iTunes needs to connect to iPods. Can you build a web app that can reach out over the USB ports and talk to an iPod? I'm pretty sure that, if I could, it would be treated as a dire emergency and high-priority patches would be issued. If I can talk to your iPod via JS, I can talk to your hard drives.
Even the Amazon music store communicates with iPods via... iTunes! There are few other ways, and no other sanctioned way.
You could, I suppose, reduce iTunes to a tiny browser plugin or a stub, but that would still require users to download and install a third-party plugin, and it would lead to problem B:
B) Now that iTunes is established with millions of existing iPod owners -- who are Apple's best customers, now that so much of iPod sales are to people replacing existing iPods -- why make a major change in their workflow, with no benefit for them and trivial benefit for the world? The risk of confusing one existing iPod customer may well offset the potential benefit of getting several new music-only customers like Jeff -- who obviously doesn't own an iPod or he wouldn't be complaining.
Plus: Cross-browser maintenance of an app as complex as iTunes is expensive and difficult, you can't control every aspect of the UI, and the population of people who balk at iTunes is small and is unlikely to contain many loyal Apple customers.