Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > July > 11 > Entry
Apple wins again
We’re really not used to hearing the words “Apple” and “monopoly” in the same sentence, but here goes: Is Apple becoming a media monopoly?
Clearly the company has become the king of the MP3 player and music downloading businesses and, oh yeah, they also make personal computers. But in just the short time that they added support in iTunes for podcasting, making it as easy as a few clicks to subscribe to free updated-on-the-fly audio content, they’re already changed the face of this form of broadcasting, putting a strain on servers and creating a run of new subscribers for the nascent medium.
Everything Apple touches, at least in the realm of its iPod product line, seems to turn to gold, even if sales of their iPods seem to be slowing down a bit.
Not to worry. Apple will just put color screens on all their regular iPods and lower prices again.
One thing Apple is doing very right with podcasting is to hop on the technological bandwagon just as this “new” form of broadcasting (which is little more than sticking audio files on the Web and making a widget that downloads them for you automatically) is getting some buzz. Apple looks like it invented podcasting when in fact it’s just lucky that the word “Pod” happens to be part of the name that stuck to the practice.
Adopting an existing technology as your own and making yourself look like a pioneer — sounds a bit like Microsoft, doesn’t it?
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