I’m not buying music from the iTunes Music Store anymore. This is a specific outcome from being a director (independent; Alsop Louie Partners is not an investor) of Sonos Inc. Sonos makes a very cool and increasingly popular system for distributing music around your house and playing different music in each room. I won’t make an ad for the system here. (I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t suggest that it is an excellent Christmas gift for the well-off computer geek who loves to listen to music.) But the one relevant aspect is that Sonos cannot play music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.That’s because that music is protected by Apple’s so-called “Fairplay” digital rights management (DRM) technology. Unfortunately, Apple won’t license Fairplay. So Sonos can’t get from Apple what it needs to be able to play tracks purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Sonos, of course, does not promote the acquisition of music illegally and is perfectly willing to pay reasonable licensing costs to use other companies’ technology to be able to play music legally. But Apple just isn’t willing to license the technology.  

 

Once I realized that about 20% of my music database is out of the reach of my Sonos system, I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store. I still use the iTunes Store for other media; for instance, I recently bought the episode of “Lost” where Ecko was killed, since my TiVo had mysteriously missed recording that episode. But I don’t buy music from the store; instead I borrow copies of the same music I already paid for from other users using the Acquisition peer-to-peer sharing system for the Macintosh. I already paid for these titles and am perfectly within my rights to have copies that do work on my system. (I won’t go into how I also use Acquisition to try out new musicians before deciding to actually buy their CD.)

But here’s the real point I’m wanting to get to: Since I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store, I’ve also noticed that I am using my iPod a lot less. I listen to music in my car; I’ve gotten sick of trying to make the radio interface for my iPod work and have just defaulted to listening to the radio. (I hate it but that’s a separate post.) I listen to music on airplanes; I’ve realized that it’s much easier to plug my Bose headphones into my computer and listen to iTunes rather than the iPod, since I always have my computer open on the airplane. I listen to music sitting in my living room; and I’ve taken to listening to music on Sonos at home.

The real point: I’m not using my iPod nearly as much as when it first came out, when Fairplay hadn’t been deployed, when Sonos hadn’t been invented and when I had a car with a tape-play instead of a CD (for the iPod interface). I’m using my iPod about 20% of the time I used to, but I’m not missing it at all. More than 70 million units later, maybe the iPod does have an end of life. Hmmm….

I’m really impressed with Palm’s partnering of late. I have a Treo 700p. I’ve been thinking traitorous thoughts because the recent switch (with the p in 700p) to a new kernel for the OS (I think), the device has begun to exhibit icckkkyyy behavior. For instance, some software is getting the processor so occupied it misses keystrokes when I’m typing. The device misses maybe 2-4 keystrokes out of every 100 or so. That doesn’t sound bad, but it means I have to review my emails in detail because the email might get so mangled, it means something completely different and potentially very bad. If you can’t trust your device to capture every keystroke, you can’t trust your device.That OS glitch combined with the really lousy state of Good Software’s GoodLink (which provides Exchange synchronization for email and calendar on the Treo 700p) is really challenging to a sensitive user like myself. For instance, Good recently upgraded its system. Along with the upgrade came the charming bug that, when you search on a name, you can only select that name on the touch screen. Something happened to the keyboard-driven cursor in the upgrade. What a monumental pain for an action I take 10-20 times a day!But Palm is making it really hard to think traitorous thoughts by partnering with other companies to make the device incredibly useful. First of all, the 700p is an EV-DO device so web browsing and searching is actually useful and functional on this device. That’s the first time I’ve ever been able to say that. So I’ve been using Google Search on the web browser since I discovered how fast it is.Recently, I heard about Google Maps for Treo, which is a client program for the Treo that let’s you do Google Map searches but customized for the smaller screen. Very very useful for walking around and finding your way to an address!

Today I discovered Yelp Mobile. It’s a customer version of Yelp tuned for the Palm browser. Very very very useful for last minute searches for restaurants and other local services. (Yelp is really winning my heart, even over old favorite Chowhound.)

This is the point of partnership development. You use other company’s development to help you get through hard times. And Palm is having a hard time getting its OS up to snuff before someone else (RIMM? Microsoft?) figures out how to build a device that’s as easy to use and well integrated….