Transatlantic Cable: Is Apple turning into Microsoft?

January in Silicon Valley means two things: fog and the MacWorld Expo. And, as sure as the Golden Gate Bridge gets lost in the morning fog, a MacWorld Expo means a Steve Jobs keynote with some big announcements, more rabid Mac fans than you can shake an iBook at, and plenty of shouting. In fact, there is more cheering and general enthusiasm than you would usually see at rock concerts.

But despite the excitement, some comments that Apple CEO (no longer interim CEO) Steve Jobs made worried me. One of the things he unveiled was how Apple is thinking "outside the box" by making www.apple.com a portal. Basically, it's adding a series of features to the site (like a Web directory called iReview and greetings cards called iCards) to encourage people to stay on the Apple site.

Apple is also launching a system called iTools, that, among other things, gives you 20Mb of free space on Apple's servers that appears on your Mac desktop as a folder. Apple calls it, unsurprisingly enough, iDisk. You can copy things to this space by simply dragging and dropping them, as well as allowing other people access with just your user name.

All pretty standard stuff (and long available on PC from services like www.Xdrive.com), but what struck me was the way that Jobs explained them. "We realized we could take unfair advantage of the fact that we own the software," said Jobs, referring to the Mac OS. In other words: because Apple writes the OS, they can write software and bundle it with the OS that can do things that nobody else can. Sound familiar?

** Steve Gates **

Certainly it sounds familiar to me: it's exactly the sort of argument that Microsoft uses, and one of the issues that got them into hot water with the US government. Not because it developed these new technologies, but because it then gave them prominence by bundling them with the OS and discouraging competition.

What chance is a service like Xdrive going to have now in the Mac market once iDisk starts shipping as part of the Mac OS? Very little, because its service will require a user to download and install their software, while iDisk will already be there for new Mac owners, ready and waiting to be used. This new service comes alongside the announcement that Apple has struck a deal with the ISP Earthlink (and bought a $200m chunk of the company as well) to be the exclusive ISP bundled with new Macs.

Of course, Apple has a right to create new features for the Mac OS - that's what it has to do to survive. But it's also coming dangerously close to doing a Microsoft; trying to own the user beyond the point of them buying the Mac and discouraging other companies from offering services. And that ain't a healthy thing to do for Apple in the long run: it may look good on the balance sheet (especially as it gets paid by Earthlink for every new user), but it stifles the competition that helps push the Mac forward.

** The answer: open source **

There is a way to avoid this: it involves doing what it's done with QuickTime. The reason QuickTime is a success is because it's easy and cheap: both the client and server are free and are available for a range of operating systems. So what Apple should do is immediately make the source code for the iDrive and similar technologies open source, so anybody can download and use them, as well as rewriting them for other operating systems like Windows and Linux. This will mean that software companies can create their own branded iDisk services, so Adobe could have an iDisk service to go with programs like Photoshop LE. And it wouldn't be long before the client can become as popular as QuickTime...

** In other news **

There were no new hardware announcements, but what we did have was the unveiling of Mac OS X, complete with a nice new user interface (called Aqua) that looks really cool. The new OS won't be launched until the middle of next year, but it was certainly the buzz of the show. The new UI looks nice: all blue gel buttons and windows that whoosh around the place. While demonstrating how windows fly in and out of the Dock (a sort of Windows toolbar on steroids that lurks at the bottom of the screen), Jobs did comment: "Hey, we've got a gigaflop of performance here," referring to the fact that he was running on a G4 Mac. Quite how fast it is on an older Mac remains to be seen...