Helping Apple's competitors do the job they can't do themselves

David Coursey wants affirmative action for Apple's competitors:

But, does this justify Apple being essentially the sole source for iPhone and iPod touch applications? I don't think so.

As for Music Store, yes, I have bought a song or two from Amazon that are now happily loaded onto my iPod. I guess that's competition.

Yet, the tight linkage between iPod/iPhone, iTunes, and the Music Store is a big wall for potential competitors to climb. And if Amazon can't compete head-to-head with Apple, who can?

Of the two, App Store and Music Store, I am more concerned about music and other content. Suppose Apple were required to publish an open API for iTunes and support all models of players and phones? And multiple content vendors?

That would dramatically increase competition in smartphones and players as well as between the Music Store and its suddenly compatible competitors. Customers might choose music stores in iTunes the same way browser users select a default search engine.

If it had equal access to iTunes and the Music Store, the Palm Pre, among other devices would immediately become more interesting. And Apple would have to compete more on features and price than the exclusive access its devices have to its online retail ecosystem.

Apple has gotten to where they are because they are the only vendor willing to offer customers a complete package that just works. Amazon has not tried that yet, and Microsoft's attempts have always been lackluster at best. Apple's competitors could have worked together to create an open standard for buying and selling content and transferring it to media players, but they're all too fiercely competitive to do that. They all want to be like Apple with their own complete stack, but none of them are either willing or able to take the steps to achieve that.

To force open the development process for the iPhone would actually be illegal for the Department of Justice because it would violate Apple's intellectual property rights and force them to change some of the security APIs on the iPhone. They'd have to set up an independent certificate authority for signing iPhone applications, give outsiders access to the development kit without any control over it, and even then they'd run into competitors who would whine that they did maintained secret hidden APIs that help them. It's not even necessary, since a meager $300 fee is all that a developer has to pay to get an enterprise license of the iPhone SDK which is what allows them to distribute their application without using the App Store.

Even if the majority of Apple's competitors had full access to its stack, that wouldn't change the fact that their software is just inferior. Most of them don't even have a mobile web browser which is capable of rendering a web page like a normal desktop browser. The only platform that can compete there at all is Android. If they aren't willing to even do that, then that is indicative of the level of effort that they are willing to put into their products in general.

This whole argument is reminiscent of the situation that Microsoft found itself in during the antitrust trial. They had a product which was good enough, and their competitors didn't offer products which provided any compelling reason to switch. In particular, Netscape Communicator was so mediocre that there was literally not a single good reason to prefer it over Internet Explorer and Outlook (that should be quite revealing to those who never used Netscape's products). What we have here is similar. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. are not willing to invest whatever it takes to make a stack that is every bit as capable as Apple's stack. Instead, they want us to believe that if only they could force Apple to open up, we'd all be better off.

Excuse me if that argument sounds to me a lot like the whining from Netscape and Sun in the late 1990s.