What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander

Yesterday, the New York times published a blog about the results of Palm’s complaint to the USB Implementers Forum:

Earlier this summer, Palm filed a complaint with the USB Implementers Forum, an industry group that oversees standards for USB connections, claiming that Apple was restraining trade by only allowing Apple devices to access iTunes, its popular media management software.

On Wednesday, the group replied to the letter, dismissing Palm’s assertion that Apple was in violation of its policies. It also said that Palm’s strategy of having its Pre phone masquerade as an iPod so it would work with iTunes was a violation of the group’s membership agreement.

The capstone to the article, however, just demonstrates how clueless some supposed “experts” can be.

An even bigger question, said J. Gerry Purdy, the chief analyst for mobile and wireless at the research firm Frost & Sullivan, is whether Apple should just allow other devices to get easy access to what users store in iTunes. If it did, Apple might end up selling more songs through its online store.

“They are the de facto music player on PCs and Macs and will look to higher revenue by allowing any device to connect to iTunes,” he said.

Apple operates the iTunes Music Store as a loss leader to sell hardware. Sure, they make a presumedly tidy profit off of music sales, but the whole point of the iTMS is to sell more iPods, iPhones, TVs and Macs. Apple is a hardware company, and they make their money by selling hardware. Opening up iTunes to Pre or other hardware competitors would mean less sales for Apple, which would be a hard case to make to its shareholders. It’s like trying to pressure Sony to let competing hardware like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 play PlayStation 3 games. Such a move would, in this case, be crippling to Sony’s PlayStation business.

In the 1990s, Apple licensed the Mac OS to third-party hardware manufacturers, which churned out tonnes of cheap Mac clones, which had the end result of bringing Apple to its knees. Apple is a hardware company, and allowing other companies to make hardware that ran their loss leader software (in this case, the Mac OS itself) meant less hardware sales for Apple, and hardware sales are its lifeblood. That’s why Apple pulled the plug on the Mac OS licensing programme.

iTunes syncing is a feature for Apple products like the iPod meant to provide the end-user with a seamless experience when using said hardware. It’s a selling point for their hardware. Unless it becomes profitable to do otherwise, Apple would be mad to open up that functionality to other hardware competitors. Really, I don’t know how many more times I can use the word “hardware” in this article before it finally sinks in that Apple is a hardware company. They’re not going to play like a software company when the lion’s share of the money they make comes from hardware sales. Period. Full-stop.