That's just BS, you can simply select all your music and videos and whatever in iTunes and drag it to a folder. Probably there's even an export function, but I'm not sure, because I've been 'locked in the Apple ecosystem' long enough I never had the urge to move my music around (it's been sitting in an iTunes library on a Linux AFS share all this time, which is also accessed by my Squeezebox. Talk about being locked in :-S). If all else fails you can just type 'iTunes' in Spotlight and it will come up with the folder that holds all your music, so you can copy it from there.

As for all the other content that 'makes you part of the ecosystem' on something like iOS or Windows Phone: all these iOS and WP apps are built for their respective platforms, so you wouldn't be able to magically transport them to an Android phone (or whatever platform) and run them anyway. You can move them between different phones and tablets that run the same OS if you want though.

The comparison with a DVD player that only plays discs from a single vendor is kind of stupid. A DVD player is like a fridge or a television, it simply performs one single function and that's what people buy it for. A HD-DVD never worked in a Blu-Ray player, and a VHS tape never worked in a Betamax player either. I can make up useless analogies all day.

It's not really clear what the author of this article actually proposes would be better than having a few 'ecosystems' like iOS, WP or Android. A one-size-fits-all ecosystem that everybody is forced to use? Many different ecosystems that somehow all have exactly the same features so you can use all your applications and content on every device?

That's a tad specific don't you think? Do you really propose that every piece of software in the world should be able to use every single bit of metadata ever used in any other random piece of software, on any other OS and any other device? Most of the iTunes metadata is in the ID3 tags, so it gets transferred. Not sure about ratings, but if they are not there it's probably because not all ID3 tag versions support it, or because different players interpret these fields differently. Anyway, tools exist to export this data from an iTunes library, nobody is stopping you from using them.

I don't really see how this is different from moving your music + ratings from Android to any other OS anyway. It's not like I can export a music library from Android or WP and preserve and import all their non-standard metadata into iTunes, right?

It isn't very different that moving from Android to another OS. Just to be clear I'm not criticizing Apple specifically, I'm just saying that the process of moving is not quite as painless as you might hope for.

I do think it is in the big players interest to consider making it easier to move. I know why they don't but I do think a company like Apple, confident in their hardware and software, would stand to benefit as much as lose out from such standardization. People like me might give up on ITunes for a year or two until the retina airs are more reasonable then switch straight back, where as right now if I do take the pain of switching I'm unlikely to be back any time soon.

Some image formats have lousy meta data. iPhoto has a lovely face tagging feature that's easy to use and really great way to index photographs. Moving that information among accounts on the same machine is weird.

> I don't really see how this is different from moving your music + ratings from Android to any other OS anyway. It's not like I can export a music library from Android or WP and preserve and import all their non-standard metadata into iTunes, right?

That's kind of the point. Very few people are building open eco-systems anymore. Everyone is happy to lock in users by creating weird software.

I think I spotted your problem.

Imagine if your BlackBerry could only send emails to other BlackBerry devices. We wouldn't accept that (although BBM is trying to push us that way) - so why should we accept it with other services?

If there were one published specification for storing a music library, before you know it some people will demand features that are not supported by it, and some software vendor will create and sell some piece of software that extends the format to provide it. It's just supply and demand.

I really can't wrap my head around this, are you really asking for generic, one-size-fits-all file formats, applications and hardware for everything, or are you just being naive?

Look at email as a standard - a few people have tried to extend that and it hasn't worked.

Or, look at HTML as a standard. People want to extend that so they fight in a committee and collaborate until there's something which is mutually beneficial.

Or, look at USB. Literally a one-size-fits-all plug on both ends and a common transport layer - but you can stick whatever device you want on either end.

Bad example. E-mail is basically just formatted text with binary attachments to be interpreted by the e-mail client. Still, almost every e-mail client uses some internal database-like format to store your inbox and augment it with metadata to make it easily searchable and whatever. E-mail clients are to e-mail what music players like iTunes are to music files. You can't just pick up your Thunderbird e-mail database and drop it somewhere for Outlook to use, just like you can't pick up your iTunes library and drop it into Windows Media Player or whatever other music player. With some effort you can often import/export e-mail databases between clients, but that's no different from importing/exporting an iTunes library.

>> Or, look at HTML as a standard. People want to extend that so they fight in a committee and collaborate until there's something which is mutually beneficial.

One of the most-heard complaints about the HTML standard is that it moves so freaking slow, and is still full of cruft and inconveniences from 20 years ago. HTML isn't actually that great at all, it's just the least worst option we have if you want cross-platform markup with all the features HTML offers today. That's not to say I propose a proprietary alternative to HTML by the way, just that HTML is hardly the prime example of a model you'd want to apply to every other piece of software.

>> Or, look at USB. Literally a one-size-fits-all plug on both ends and a common transport layer - but you can stick whatever device you want on either end.

First of all that's not entirely true, because USB only defines a transport layer, not how the data going over the wire should be interpreted. It isn't all that different from something like RS-232 serial communication, just a lot more advanced. In itself there's nothing you can do with USB alone, you still need a protocol, which is usually implemented by a driver. Apart from generic hardware such as mass storage devices, almost any USB device that implements any kind of specialized hardware functions needs a hardware-specific driver, and more often than not, thesre are proprietary. Don't confuse 'open' with 'generic' by the way, because even if some piece of hardware uses an 'open' protocol, it's still not 'generic' as you can't do anything with it without a (very specific) driver. Second, USB is not really the epitome of 'openness' either, as you have to pay royalties to sell hardware that uses the USB standard and carries the USB logo.

Any more examples? ;-)

You can just move around the mails themselves, just like you can move around your music, and as a small bonus, the static playlists.

Eh, what? Features don't matter. It's just the data that should be portable.

If one platform supports "dynamic playlists" (which is just the equivalent of a view in SQL) and another platform doesn't, that might be a bit inconvenient, but it really doesn't matter. At least your data can be converted.

It also violates the agreement companies agree to to be usb certified. What Apple did afterwards to ensure only their devices were being advertised is their own business. But lets be clear. Palm was in the wrong here. It doesn't absolve Apples decisions, but I can see why they did what they did.

It also likely explains why Apple started doing drm-like authentication to its devices.

That's literally the only point I was making. Apple didn't need to do anything to have other devices working with iTunes. Once they were, by whatever means, Apple made the decision to make changes to further disallow it. Apple didn't need to go out of their way to provide interoperability, but they did go out of their way to break interoperability, no matter how the competitors achieved it.

What Apple did wrong and what Palm did wrong are not part of my argument.

Apple making changes to disallow it were because they were breaking their usb agreement to do it. You are not supposed to identify your devices as anything but what they are. Explain to me how Apple is doing anything bad here because of what Palm started doing? As mentioned elsewhere, the xml file itunes generates is there for interoperability, Palm chose to do something they should not have. There is a difference of "breaking interoperability" (sic), and acting as if you are some other device to an operating system. Palm was doing the latter, not the former.

Apple had no obligation to let Palm sync with their software. Palm had no right to sync with their software. But Apple released three updates in a row that each conveniently broke compatibility with Palm's hardware. That's the extent of what I am saying. I'm not arguing that Apple had to support it, but rather that they explicitly disallow it, and will fight to keep it disallowed. Arguing that this was mere coincidence sounds like a violation of Occam's Razor. Possible, but unlikely.

No they don't, iTunes offers the Library.xml file for interoperability. My Nokia E71 and E6 work just fine with iTunes (on Mac OS X) via Library.xml. In fact is works better than my iPods since iTunes doesn't need to be running to sync with my Nokia phones.

Capitalist or otherwise, my point wasn't "this will put you out of business", it was that iTunes was working with other devices without Apple needing to do any work on their end. The work they performed on their end worked to destroy that.

As a capitalist, I hope that you understand that shutting Palm out is not the reason, or even a contributing factor to Apple's success. I'm honestly not sure what point you're trying to make, as the Palm v Apple software dispute has nothing to do with Apple's valuation nor does it have anything to do with Palm's fate. That is a non-sequitur.

Palm wasn't the biggest competitor, but they were certainly a competitor. If all of them went away it seems pretty obvious that that would be good for Apple, and Palm being gone is a contributing factor, albeit a small one.

Palm was acquired, and then for intents and purposes shut down last year.

Both my Sony android device and my lumia 800 syncs perfectly with my iTunes (non drm) media. Even my old Symbian phone did it before palm.