I can scarcely begin to express my contempt for the idea of any essentially profit-driven entity succeeding in becoming a leading repository of any media, be it music, images, text, or whatever, in virtue of information storage in proprietary format.
There is a well-known institution which has been around for well over 2000 years which does function as a repository of (in modern jingoism) "experience". That storage used to be restricted to the textual, and extends in modern times to also include the aural and visual. As everywhere, increasingly under pressure to self-finance, its general spirit remains to serve as a public good. Its existence is even a measure of humanity: its burning/disappearance is always a sure sign of our depravity. It generally gives its users unrestrictive access to wholes, not stray tidbits, and if its service has a subscription fee, it is reasonable. The institution I speak of is a public library.
Anything which needs to trade on its future now to survive today, is much less likely to survive than anything which already has a -- deservedly -- celebrated past. Needless to say, i or eTunes/Images/Books/Films and the like will never be the apple of my eye.
If the issues involved were only banal, about sliding scales of cost/quality, frankly I wouldn't care much more about these things than about any other barterable good. But it's also about control/freedom. The M$ phenomenon is but a minor consumerist appearance of how the slippery slope of the apparently trivial can be much steeper than anyone ever imagined. So how did it all begin? In the beginning there was convenience.
There is a well-known institution which has been around for well over 2000 years which does function as a repository of (in modern jingoism) "experience". That storage used to be restricted to the textual, and extends in modern times to also include the aural and visual. As everywhere, increasingly under pressure to self-finance, its general spirit remains to serve as a public good. Its existence is even a measure of humanity: its burning/disappearance is always a sure sign of our depravity. It generally gives its users unrestrictive access to wholes, not stray tidbits, and if its service has a subscription fee, it is reasonable. The institution I speak of is a public library.
Anything which needs to trade on its future now to survive today, is much less likely to survive than anything which already has a -- deservedly -- celebrated past. Needless to say, i or eTunes/Images/Books/Films and the like will never be the apple of my eye.
If the issues involved were only banal, about sliding scales of cost/quality, frankly I wouldn't care much more about these things than about any other barterable good. But it's also about control/freedom. The M$ phenomenon is but a minor consumerist appearance of how the slippery slope of the apparently trivial can be much steeper than anyone ever imagined. So how did it all begin? In the beginning there was convenience.