Who's afraid of the Big Bad Bill? Well, if Apple isn't, technically it probably should be; despite Apple's unthinkably huge head start with GUIs and ease of use a couple of decades back, the OS That Gates Built now has something like thirty times the Mac's market share and wields monopoly power with the subtlety of a bull elephant playing the bagpipes. Many armchair CEOs agree that if Apple had just been open to licensing its operating system way back when, it'd be the Mac OS with 90+% of the market today. Instead, it chose to go it alone, and eventually got whomped by cheapo clones carrying Microsoft licenses.

Now, we've always found that argument a little specious, actually, since if the Mac OS had shipped on a gazillion cheap no-name clones, the odds are pretty good that many of the same headaches and compatibility nightmares that have always plagued the Wintel side of the fence would have afflicted the Mac OS platform, as well-- and if you've ever owned a cheap Mac clone from the Amelio era, you probably understand all too well when we say that a Mac clone isn't a Mac. It's Apple's tight control over and integration between its hardware and software that leads to such a special computing experience for the customer, and sometimes we really have to think hard about whether we'd push the Alternate Reality button and trade in Apple current sitch for a ton of market share but a Mac experience that couldn't possibly compare to what we enjoy today.

That said, part of it's true: Apple almost collapsed completely in the mid-nineties in part because it couldn't compete with the cheap "good enough" Wintel clones that were ubiquitous to the point of showing up as a prize in your morning bowl of Fruity Pebbles-- and now the New York Post thinks that history is going to repeat itself with online music download services. The iTunes Music Store may be numero uno right now, and "competition" like BuyMusic.com and Napster may not be much of a threat, but reportedly Microsoft just shook hands with a company called Loudeye, and the upshot will be that anyone who wants an online music download service can get one from Loudeye/Microsoft for cheap. And guess whose media format Fred's Music Service will therefore be using?

The parallel to the Mac-vs.-Windows thing is pretty striking; the iTMS is the best service, the iPod is the best product, but when it comes to downloadable music each only works with the other-- no other portable device supports Apple's digital rights management scheme. Meanwhile, most players support Microsoft's WMA format, and that's what most download services sell. Just as anyone can get a WMA-based online music store, anyone can build a player that supports WMA because Microsoft is plenty happy to license it out. So the Post is setting this up like a classical Greek tragedy or something, with Apple doomed to suffer the same fate over and over again because it's genetically and/or cosmically compelled to ship the first, best, and proprietary solution that eventually gets steamrolled by a horde of mediocre copycats based on a widely-licensed competing technology. It doesn't exactly rank up there with killing your pop, getting frisky with your mom, and finally popping your eyeballs in despair, but hey, what does?

When it comes to business decisions, of course, we just haven't a clue, so we dive in back and let the pros take the wheel. We just hope that Steve knows what he's doing, because when he tells USA Today flat-out that the iTMS will only ever support the iPod, that he's completely unconcerned about giants like Walmart entering the fray, and that he's not planning any price reductions or big changes when Microsoft and Sony launch competing services, there's a faint whiff of hamartia in the air. Or maybe Steve's 110% correct and that smell is actually Right Guard. We'll know if the iPod is still king in a couple of years and Steve is still fresh, dry, and smelling sporty.