NetMusician Labs

I’ve been finding Apple’s strategies lately to be truly bizarre, and I have a hard time seeing how they can work in Apple’s favor.

Yes, Apple’s market share has been growing, but I think this is happening in spite of some of the decisions they have been making lately, not because of these decisions.

Apple has been making gestures at wanting to grow their market share. We’ve seen this with Boot Camp, with iWork, with Safari Windows, and other attempts Apple has been making to reach out to new markets. However, Apple is still the small guy in the market and seems to forget this. In order to really grow the Mac, it would be in their best interest to try to penetrate as many new and existing markets as possible to get Apple’s products out there and in mainstream usage, just like the iPod and iPhone.

In order to really achieve this level of market penetration, they need to focus on choice and interoperability, not simply bait, switch, and then start charging. This is what Microsoft does. This is what CDDB/Gracenote did, this is what you can do when you have a monopoly in a market. Apple does not monopolize the desktop space, as a whole.

Instead of starting a free service in iTools, and then later charging for it, tying in their own products to only work with .Mac, and barely keeping .Mac competitive, why not allow the iLife apps to work with any server seamlessly - treat them as equal citizens? Think about the sort of penetration they would reach if every hosting provider advertised interoperability with iWeb, iMovie, Backup, Time Machine, and all of the other apps Apple provides, provided how-to guides, and all that was required was… a Mac. There are a gazillion hosting providers in the world, and with things like network backup, content sharing, and all of these other web services really hitting critical mass, Apple would really become well known if they didn’t limit their audience to .Mac subscribers. Apple probably only makes enough from .Mac to buy them a bag of donuts anyway….

What’s weird is that this sort of thing is so inconsistent. Apple’s new version of iCal will work with their open source calendar server that will run on a variety of platforms. Why are they doing this with only iCal, and how long will they continue to do this? The other thing Apple needs if they wish to really penetrate new markets is offering something dependable. Why would a hosting provider invest into something like calendar server if there was no real indication as to how long this service will be free (without requiring a license fee), and what Apple’s developer relationships will be like with the rest of the world (which also seem skitzo)?

Why does iChat only work with AIM? Why is iMovie 08 far less useful, and now showing strong indications that Apple wants customers to upgrade to Final Cut Express?

I’m sure others can cite similar examples, but my main point is this:

• if you want to expand your market share, make consistent attempts to penetrate new markets, and emphasize interoperability and choice rather than trying to be something you are not. Apple is simply not big enough to play the lock-in game as much as they try to do.
• if you want to remain a niche market player, fine, but what’s with all of these gestures and half attempts? What are you Apple? Make up your mind…

I’m not suggesting that everything Apple offers should be free, far from it, but I’ve always been under the impression that .Mac, iLife, and pretty much all software Apple develops is a catalyst to sell Macs. Rather, it seems like Apple is trying to make as much money as possible with selling these products rather than taking into the account the larger picture of trying to sell more Macs and get the Mac into new markets. Really.. how much are they going to make in getting people to upgrade to Final Cut Express compared to the potential to sell new Macs because iMovie 08 is the bomb?

It’s just all rather strange to me, is all. With the crippled video card in the new iMac (making the machine much less attractive to Windows gamers - exactly the market they should be going after to expand themselves, IMHO) and the release of iLife 08 getting such mixed reviews, it seems like we’re seeing a lot more “WTF?!” being expressed within the Mac community, and rightfully so.

Does any of this resonate?

Okay, this subject is sort of false advertising, but…

Mozilla Sunbird used to be pretty rough and ragged, but I’ve been impressed with their recent 0.5 release which came out earlier this summer. It seems to work just fine under OS X.

One of the features in 0.5 is iCal support. I was able to subscribe to my existing iCal calendars no problem, as well as import iCal calendar files. It seems to work fine.

The main, compelling reason to use either iCal in Leopard or Mozilla Sunbird today is for its CalDAV support. CalDAV will allow multiple users to read and write to the same calendar. In other words, you could publish a calendar you created at home and write to it at work.

In order to do this, you will need a Calendar server to do this. Apple’s own Darwin Calendar Server is open source, and the developers say it is pretty much done. I’ve been running it without incident for quite some time now.

Like Apple’s other open source projects, setting it up is very easy to do. There is an included script that will install Calendar Server for you, and you can do this on any Unix-based machine. It obviously works out-of-the-box on Tiger Server or Cilent, but people have also gotten it running under Linux, and I had little difficulty installing it under FreeBSD using the Linux install instructions.

If you have access to any old spare computer with an internet connection, you could set yourself up a calendar server pretty easily. Apple includes a template configuration file, all you have to do is change the path to the calendar storage directory on the server, if you want, as well as setup your authentication to this machine. The default authentication is simply XML file based auth, all you have to do is type in a user/pass into the XML file for your realm.