Gruber Tackles the "Thoughts on Music" Critics

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fired back at two pundits who have publicly criticized Steve Job's essay "Thoughts on Music". Gruber takes apart each critic's arguements one by one.

On the jackass menu this time: Paul Thurrott of Windows IT Pro and Paul Kedrosky of The Wall Street Journal

Some highlights:
on DRM and the market ~
"But Microsoft is a paper tiger in this realm. Their music DRM is only relevant to anyone who has bought one of their music players — which is to say a decided minority of the market. Their Windows monopoly has not allowed them to establish a de facto industry standard here, like it has so many times in the past. The most popular DRM-encoded music format for Windows users is FairPlay; the most popular music player for Windows users is the iPod."

on Apple and eMusic's dominance in the electronic music download market ~
"(That eMusic is the second-most-popular download store means several good things for Apple: (a) both of the top two download stores fully support iTunes and iPod playback on both Mac and Windows; (b) neither of them use Microsoft technology; and (c) because eMusic only sells songs from independent labels, it means Apple’s share of the legal download market for major label music is even higher than its share of the overall legal download market.)"

and...
"Microsoft’s problem with the iTunes Store isn’t that it has created an unfair playing field, but rather that it has prevented Microsoft from creating an unfair playing field tilted in its own favor."

on PlayForSure interoperability on Microsofts own products ~
"Which brings us to the most deliciously jackassed aspect of Thurrott’s call for Apple to voluntarily bridge the DRM gap, which is that Microsoft is so DRM-happy that they don’t even offer cross-support between their own DRM standards. Zunes don’t work with PlaysForSure DRM and PlaysForSure gadgets don’t work with Zune DRM."

Gruber ends his rant with a very powerful thought:

"Kedrosky has clearly missed — or refuses to believe — the main point of Jobs’s argument. It’s almost impossible to see how allowing Apple to sell DRM-free music through iTunes would make piracy worse. Music piracy is already rampant. There is not a single song on iTunes that can’t be downloaded for free from a P2P network. If iTunes were to switch to DRM-free music, would it stop anyone who is already buying music from iTunes? No

People who are already buying from iTunes would continue to. People who refused to buy from iTunes because of DRM might start. And people who bootleg would continue to bootleg. This situation would be better for the music industry, not worse. The problem from the music industry’s perspective is their technically ludicrous pipe dream of devising a scheme that forces everyone to pay for every single song they play. They obsess over pirates while taking their honest customers for granted."

Read the entire rant here. A fantasitc read!