Here’s what proprietary actually means:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/818227B3-157E-4C2D-9C1C-F503C2B7A227.html

Yes, Apple “property” has a fence but it’s a two-foot fence designed to keep it nice if you’re ON THE INSIDE of that fence.

That is the main difference. Without rehashing a lot of stuff - just take a look at itunes. First, it’s FREE and it’s constantly upgraded AND even in areas where Apple can just say - sorry, buy a mac - they have gone out to create a solution so you can load and sync photos from third party software such as ELEMENTS or MS’s Windows … not only that, it’s thanks to Apple’s entry into online music that digital music is the ONLY digital format we can LEGALLY convert to a DRM free format! Where was MS on this issue the 6 years prior with their WMA stores? after Apple’s entry, they changed also. Itunes plays and converts up to 7 formats INCLUDING DRM free WMA. It even has THREE lossless formats and again, thanks to Apple, no hacking is required to load ANY and EVERY song from a competiting online store (it also works in reverse, any itunes song can be converted to a CD and then re-imported). It’s EVEN less of a restriction than movie theaters or Disneyland (no outside food). Or that itunes the software allows you to turn off the store - you think anyone else would let you do that?

I’m not claiming Apple is all rainbows and cotton candy nor are they perfect but the fences they generally build are to keep those on the inside happy - not to keep people out or to lock you in.

Like .mac, yes, there are 10 websites that can replicate 90% of .mac but why go to 10 websites when one might serve your purpose? And one consistent interface? It’s an add-on that is great for many people. Basically two clicks in iphoto publishes your photos to a website. Visitors do not have to log in or sign up. Photos do not get resized nor are they deleted after a year and the design templates are all classy. For many people, it’s great. You even get a easy to see url and a chance to send an email telling family & friends the photos are up … yes, therea re literally 100 sites to post photos and while places like FLICKR offer savvy users more options, if you do not pay for an advanced option, you cannot upload batches (unless you are savvy and use the third party uploader) so, which is really easier to use?

As for this discussion, it reminds me of the scene from The Animal with Rob Schnieder where the rowdy crowd is ready to lynch the guilty party… until they find out the guilty party is the black guy. Suddenly, no one wants to be seen hanging the minority black guy. Sure, it’s okay to hang the white guy, the most popular guy, the one who can take the hit because he “has it coming to him”… but not the underdog martyr. With 5-7% (or whatever it is) market share, Apple is the underdog and it’s just “not on” to kick a guy when he’s already down. Of course, if you do that, all the MacZealots are going to start foaming at the mouth.

Just so’s you all know, I’m a MacZealot myself, so I’m allowed to call it for what it is. Even I can see that Apple is a little proprietary… they aren’t quite as bad as Microsoft, but they they can’t make money if they give away the farm, either.

I recall seeing an ad years ago when shopping for a laptop. Apple’s marketing spin was, “Apple has 13 laptops… and Apple makes them all.” Instead of yielding to cloning for a larger market share, Apple chose to keep everything in house and specialize—both hardware and software. The plus is that their hardware and software integrates seamlessly. The minus is that being proprietary is their part and parcel. If you’re a programmer and want to customize every part of your machine, Microsoft has been the Goliath for many years, but when little David comes along, is it a surprise to any MacZealot that such a seamless OS environment requires a higher percentage of proprietary thinking?

Toddy, your biggest misconception is that people who put Apple bumper stickers on their cars are driven to do so because Apple’s proprietary hardware and software is just plain cool. The best on the market, according to us MacZealots!

We missed you yesterday, by the way. Tracie’s pregnant!

Knowing *why* Microsoft is able to unilaterally force new standards onto the computing industry, doesn’t make it any better.

They don’t do it by choice, Apple could not impose his own proprietary PDF or his own proprietary OpenGL anyway.

mac control both hw and sw so it controls the experience. do you not understand windowz is a HAL hardware abstraction layer- whilst mac is INTEGRATED. OS X runs so well, because they only have to test it on 12 models of computer- not 4,000 ASUS MLBs, with 63 chip makers for usb, pci, agp, etc. why you think windows has so many errors? ms not smart programmers? that silly- they plenty smart…too many hw configs to test / run on. EVERYTHING BETA ALWAYS! ALWAYS BETA!

good luck to you sir finding your way out the door in the am, if this misrepresentation of facts is to be construed as your mental accomplishment today.

if you run os x on crap hardware it will be almost as crappy as windows.

is the rain on the plane now sparky?

Here’s a clear explaination, from RoughlyDrafted Magazine:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/818227B3-157E-4C2D-9C1C-F503C2B7A227.html

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Of course, on the subject of Microsoft vs Apple, Apple has chosen to use a number of open industry standards in key parts of the OS: PDF, OpenGL, AAC audio and H.264 video. Even .Mac is based on WebDAV - an open standard Microsoft invented!

Microsoft has chosen to invent its own standards: its own proprietary PDF, “Metro;” its own proprietary OpenGL, DirectX; its own proprietary AAC, WMA, and its own proprietary video codecs.

Why? Because Microsoft wants to destroy your choices and interoperability and own markets and lock up technologies. But at least they run on lots of old BIOS-based PCs. Sheesh.

However I don’t think you can claim that the Microsoft OS products are “non proprietary” just because they run on lots of machines. In fact, the Microsoft OS is less open than the Apple OS - the Apple OS kernel is open source and the developer tools are free.

Interestingly, the companies providing the proprietary products are the ones making the profits. The Wintel structure rewards Microsoft in a world where there is hardware interchangeability, but not OS interchangeability - and puts the hardware companies in a race to the bottom on margins (Dell being the most recent example of where this leads, trying to win on volume but suffering on margins).

Now, considering that the Intel-based Apple systems can run basically any PC OS - in part due to adoption of those same hardware standards the rest of the PC clone companies use - how do you classify an Apple computer ? It can run anything now.

I can see your frustration that OS X is not available as widely as the Microsoft OS - it is tied to a hardware purchase - but that’s one of the reasons Apple has been able to ship a more steady flow of updates to the OS, by virtue of supporting known hardware configs. That’s their choice, you don’t have to like it, you have lots of hardware choices to run XP or UNIX on.

It was easy for Microsoft to create a stable and captive licensee market from the start. A series of very particular events put MS in a position where they could sell a software solution to harware makers to make them “IBM compatible”.

IBM was a big name and MS used it to create demand for their DOS (which they didn’t even write themselves but bought at a ridiculous price without telling the author they were going to work with IBM).

At this point, MS had a captive market, with an increasing demand to be compatible with “Internaltional Business Machines”.

Their empire was built around compatibility with the original DOS which relied on the IBM name for credibility.

It was easy for Microsoft to create a licensee market for portable digital audio players around 2000. All these gadgets have to be connected to a computer, that runs an OS… Who dominates the OS market?

The audio player makers couldn’t help but say yes when MS asked them if they wanted to be sure to be able to connect their player to Windows… their DRM plans was probably used as an argument to tell them that they’d need the official MS-blessed way to connect.

The first iPod only played MP3, AIFF and WAV. Then Apple chose AAC (audio part of MPEG-4) as the logical successor to MP3, and this format is as open as MP3, as it’s not tied to the interest of the monopolist OS maker.

So Apple is pushing AAC against WMA, isn’t that a good thing? AAC can be played on Mac, Windows and Linux without any hack.

Every other player maker could license AAC, including MS, why don’t they?

The FairPlay DRM you say?

Well since Apple is pushing the open standard AAC, they can’t use Microsoft’s DRM, and anyway they don’t want MS to take control of the DRM market. So they had to create their own DRM.

DRMs are proprietary by nature, Apple couldn’t get around this if they wanted to fight MS on the mainstream music market.

What if Apple tried to license FairPlay in 2002? They would have been laugh at by MP3 player makers, as they would see no interest of using something other than WMA, and they didn’t want to upset MS. That the iPod would have been such a success wasn’t clear either, so essentialy a FairPlay license held no value at that time, Apple would have had a hard time trying to license it by then.

As the iPod and iTMS gained market share the value of FairPlay grew, and it still grows.

If Apple licenses too soon, they won’t get enough support and the whole thing will fail and everyone will fall back to WMA, and they’ll have ruined their only chance of doing such a move.

Despite Apple having 75% of the market (in the US), many still think that MS will prevail… This goes to show that MS has some additional weight in the balance.

Apple needs a very high market share against MS, and has to show that it can sustain this share to be taken seriously by companies that could want to jump in the FairPlay bandwagon.

Currently, while some few companies bitch about the lack of FairPlay licenses, I don’t think many are really serious about wanting a license. What most really want is a way to get iPod users to migrate toward their players, essentially using Fairplay/AAC as a transitional, legacy support format, while still moving forward to impose WMA as the standard.

If all other players could play both FairPlay/AAC and WMA DRM, well WMA would be declared the winner, because it’s the Windows default, The iPod would be the only one not supporting both formats and would be pressured to add WMA support. FairPlay/AAC would then become legacy and be dropped as quickly as possible…

Having the dominant OS maker control 90% of the audio DRM market would be 10x worse than having Apple in the same position. And the key difference is not which company is more evil, but the simple fact that MS controls the OS market, and Apple doesn’t.

You can’t separate and compare the OS and digital music market like two independant things, the digital music market is a subset of the OS market. MS can use it’s dominant position to impose audio formats and easily create a license market.

If MS decided to seriously adopt AAC instead of WMA as the Windows audio standard and then ask Apple to give control of the FairPlay DRM to the guys that hold the AAC format so they can license to everyone, Apple would be ready to negociate a nice deal with them because it would be fair…