4 posts tagged “steve jobs”

I heard an interesting story this weekend that I hadn’t heard before: Why the the iPhone has a glass screen, who makes it, and how it came into being. The kernel of the tale is this:

Steve scratches his iPhone at a game. Steve demands glass, and Apple’s engineers can’t make it happen. They’ve tried, called everyone in Japan, Germany, China and elsewhere. Nobody’s making glass with the right combination of thin, hard, transmissive, and able to be shaped and cut to precise shapes/specifications. Finally Steve personally phones the CEO of Corning, and after convincing him that it’s actually Steve Jobs, he says he’ll call back in 15.

15 minutes later, he returns Steve’s call and says they’ve got some prototype glass that’s not quite ready for the market yet, but maybe things can be worked out.

Things do get worked out, and Steve doesn’t have to make good on his threat to stop the launch of the iPhone.

Not sure if this story has any truth to it, but it’s certainly interesting. I wonder if/when/ever this will be noted in Corning’s quarterly reports.

First Jobs denounces DRM and then Gates announces support for OpenID?

Hell...freezing...

Interesting letter from The Steve:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.