The Silicon Valley Geek

Tom Krazit wrote a pretty interesting article on CNET about Apple’s missed .MAC opportunity.

I am not going to recap what was in the article. However, I would like to point out that the picture is more complicated than what Tom painted.

For example, he talked about a low cost way to allow users to share photos à la Flickr. This is great. However, the simple ability to upload gigabytes of photo or other content is no longer sufficient in this Web 2.0 world. In the Web 1.0 days, you had a website and that was it.

Today, you have all sorts of accounts in multiple locations: Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube etc. This collection of accounts and all make up your online persona.

One thing I have admired about Flickr is how ubiquitous it has become. For example, I can publish my Flickr happenings on my Facebook profile. I can do the same with any social network that I create with Ning.com.

This means that if I am interested in photo sharing, all I need is to set up one single account with Flickr and I can share photos with the other “aspects” of my online persona.

I can do the same thing with YouTube: share my own videos or my favorite videos.

One of the problems many users encounter today is that they don’t want to or have the time to re-do or recreate their online profiles or content. One recent movement, for example, has been to allow users to share their online profiles across different social networking websites.

Therefore, if Apple really wants to leverage its .MAC property and provide a solid value to the consumer, it has to make it such that the consumer can link his content on his .MAC account to the other aspects of his online persona. Reducing the cost of subscribing to .MAC is not sufficient by itself.

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the iTunes store is a great way for Apple to lock in iPod users and make it costly to migrate to competitors’ MP3 players.

When you have bought hundreds of songs (or content) from the iTunes store, you will limit yourself to iPod or iPod-compatible devices (like the iPhone) otherwise those hundreds of songs will become unusable bits.

Devices from other companies will not play back this content because of various copy protection schemes (aka Digital Rights Management).

This scenario, however, only applies to less savvy consumers.

There are programs out there (both on Windows and Mac) that will allow you to convert M4P-encoded music purchased from the iTunes store to MP3, which can then be played back on any other MP3 player.

I just evaluated one such software, called “M4P Converter for MAC”, which I will refer to as M4PConverter.

M4PConverter emulates a writable CDROM drive. You use iTunes to create an audio CD using the emulated CDROM drive. M4PConverter will capture the audio data sent out from iTunes and encode that into MP3 format.

The software works. I just converted most of my purchased songs to MP3. However, the software is not that easy to use. This is especially if, like me, you don’t like to read the manual…  I was especially confused by the appearance of a little disk eject icon on the Mac menu bar which is actually a drop down list.

I hate to say this, but Microsoft got it right in Windows XP when the Start menu pops up a bubble to tell you that a new program was installed. At least, if the new program doesn’t install a shortcut on the desktop, you are reminded as to where to look for it. With OS X, you are expected to go to the Applications folder to look for any newly installed software. That, IMHO, is not exactly user-friendly. Mac gurus will doubtlessly say: “why don’t you spotlight it?”

You have to first start the M4PConverter program (it is installed by default in the Applications folder as M4PConverter).

Then you start up iTunes and burn a playlist to CD.

M4PConverter will then convert songs in that playlist to MP3 files.

QED