Does anyone remember Real Networks and ultimately what happened to them? It’s a history lesson that Plam could learn from. During the early years of the online music battle a cat and mouse game between Apple and Real Networks broke out when Real built a player capable of playing music purchased on iTunes. Apple responded by breaking Real’s technology with every iTunes update and Real responded by fixing it with each update of their own.
Eventually Apple won out and customers grew tired of having a working solution one day and a broken one the next. The lesson learned from this story however was clear: business models that depend on you hacking your competitors products are a really bad idea.
Fast forward to today and Apple finds itself in the same position again, only this time it’s the Palm Pre with it’s dependency on hacking iTunes. It’s not even clear to me why the Pre needs to sync directly with iTunes this way as there is plenty of software out there that can interface with the iTunes library. Palm should put this misguided strategy behind them and create its own software for keeping everything in sync otherwise I guarantee you, this isn’t going to end well for Palm.
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