Friday, September 10, 2004

Masks...

Masks

We all hide under a layer of covering,
Not wanting to get hurt,
Looking for love.

Some advice us to strip right down,
Show ourselves to the world,
Not to be afraid.

People should either love us as we are,
Or not at all,
Love is unconditional.

But few of us have the guts to let it all go,
Just be ourselves,
No matter what the cost.

So afraid to lose, to have nobody,
We cling on to our many selves,
But we'll get it someday.

All of us.

Ratna Tiwary

Copyright ©2004 Ratna Tiwary
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I wrote that at the grand old age of fifteen, must've been one depressed teenager! Anyway, just had an interesting thought, (inspired by Amit)... when ur depressed/sad/negative mood... you generally create a facade of happiness/optimism/positive mood... and somehow on some level it actually makes us feel a little better, why? Well, probably because we are such good actors that we fool ourselves with out 'acting'! We know how to act so as to con ourselves into believing our own show/facade! amazing!

The article regarding which i wrote to Today about...

Apple's control-freak tendencies could crush iPod:


The past couple of years, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs has gotten nothing but roses and kisses from the public and the media.

But a feud between Apple and RealNetworks over music downloads is exposing Jobs' tragic flaw. Amazingly, he seems to be making the same devastating mistakes with the iPod that he made with the Mac 20 years ago.

Given the subject, it's only fitting to put the situation to music, so here's part of the story to the tune of the old hit American Pie:

Long, long time ago/ I can still remember how Steve Jobs made us smile

He knew the Mac was truly great;/ it trumped that DOS made by Bill Gates

And dominated PCs for a while.

But '85 in retrospect/ looks like a case of gross neglect

Bad news of a crisis;/ the Mac, Jobs wouldn't license

I can't remember if I cried/ as I watched Apple's business slide

Too bad those lessons weren't applied/ The day the iPod died

So bye, bye to the Pod with an i

We'll use Real or just steal, swapping files on the fly

The Apple faithful might continue to buy

Singing, iPod has such elegant lines.

But iPod has such elegant lines.

The iPod has half the digital music player market, and iTunes sells 70% of all legitimate music downloads. Jobs practically willed the digital music business into being. (Jobs, by the way, just had cancer surgery. He says he is OK and expects to fully recover. He also says he'll be back to work in September.)

But Jobs has blown it before — and, boy, does it look like he's blowing it again. It's like some Shakespearean drama where the lead character both triumphs and is undone by the same powerful characteristic — in Jobs' case, his evangelical fervor about his technology.

Go back, for a moment, to 1984. While hard to imagine now, Jobs was so powerful, he could call Gates and order him to come to Apple's headquarters so Jobs could yell at the Microsoft co-founder — and Gates would go! Apple had the best technology in personal computing and a major market share.

But around 1985, Jobs and his executives decided not to license Apple's technology or operating system to any other company. Apple wanted total control. It wanted to sell all the products itself. It wanted no competitors.

This was a yawning opening for Microsoft, Intel and the PC. Since anyone could buy the licenses and components to make a Windows-based PC, that technology took wing.

"Apple could have reaped the benefits of having dozens, even hundreds of imitators all adding their own unique value to the Mac," wrote Jim Carlton in his 1997 book, Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders. "Legions of suppliers would have sprung up all around the world to furnish components such as disk drives and memory. And since the software was light-years ahead of everybody else's, the Mac's, not Windows, might have come to dominate the personal computer market."

Instead, the opposite happened for Apple, and the PC crowd took advantage of those kinds of economics. This year, Apple is left with less than 4% of the market for personal computers — basically a cult following.

More recently, Jobs has done for digital music what he once did for personal computing: He's made it appealing to non-techies. Once again, his design sets the pace. No device is as good as the iPod; no software solution works better than iTunes.

But like the Mac of 1985, it's a closed system. Other than open-source MP3 files, only music downloaded through iTunes will play on iPods, and iTunes music won't play on any portable device except an iPod. Apple refuses to license the technology to third parties. Instead of setting a standard for all, Apple wants to own it all. When Microsoft behaves that way, everybody screams antitrust.

Last week, Real publicly exposed Apple's obduracy. Real announced that it has a way for people to legally download and play songs that work on both Apple's products and Windows-based products. It's the kind of flexibility consumers want. But Apple doesn't seem to care.

"Consumers are not in the end going to put up with being locked in," says Josh Bernoff, consumer tech analyst at Forrester Research.

Music has a long history of competing standards in new technology, but the split never lasts. In 1950, it was RCA Victor's 45 rpm record vs. Columbia's 33, and eventually all record players accommodated both. In 1970, it was Philips' audio cassette vs. the eight-track — invented by William Powell Lear, who also created the Learjet. The eight-track soon disappeared.

Apple can't win by keeping its music technology to itself.

"Apple is behaving stupidly as usual with regard to allowing other companies to add value to its products," says Avram Miller, a tech investor and former vice president at Intel, which benefited greatly from Jobs' past mistakes. "It can only lead to reducing (Apple's) share of the market it helped create."

Just as it happened with PCs, other digital music products will narrow Apple's technology lead. Maybe those products will never be as good as Apple's, but they'll become good enough — and they'll be based on broader standards that don't lock in users, and they'll probably be cheaper.

If history is any guide, when that happens Apple's share of digital music will leach away.

Miller, also an accomplished musician, goes on to call Apple "the Singapore of computing."

You know Singapore: autocratic, insular, elegantly engineered, repressively controlled — and destined to never amount to more than a small but interesting dot on the world map.

Kevin Maney has covered technology for USA TODAY since 1985. His column appears Wednesdays. Click here for an index of Technology columns. E-mail him at: kmaney@usatoday.com.