Sunday October 29, 2006
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Sunday October 29, 2006 | Does Apple's iTunes Disable the Competition? | Computers |
Update [12 Mar 2007]: The problem has been fixed iTunes 7.1. Thanks to Tony Bove for the comment!
Someone is guilty of some bullsh!t.
Forgive the strong language (lest I become the next Tim Bray), but it's called for. For many years I have been using Musicmatch Jukebox for playing music on my computer. I prefer it as a player/ripper over WinAMP and iTunes. You may disagree with that choice, but hopefully you agree that we should all have a choice. I do have an iPod and was using iTunes 6 to update it. iTunes and Musicmatch lived happily together without conflict. If you don't know, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch and it is now part of Yahoo! Music.
So, the problem: I recently upgraded to iTunes 7 and suddenly Musicmatch stopped working. It just bailed with a very generic message to reboot or contact customer support.
Customer support's response was this:
"Let me guess, you upgraded to version 7? There is no workaround or fix for this currently. Please uninstall iTunes to see if that will resolve your problem."
Uninstalling iTuens did "fix" the problem, but it's not really a solution, especially when Musicmatch can no longer update an iPod. For a while (2002-2003), Musicmatch was the only way to update an iPod on Windows (and in fact, was bundled with the iPod).
And guess what? This isn't the first time that this has happened. Shortly after iTunes for Windows came out (2003) there was a conflict between the two programs. Installing iTunes disabled Musicmatch's ability to update, or even see, the iPod.
So, who it to blame? Apple? Are they intentionally disabling a competitor's product, or just guilty of bad programming? Maybe it's Yahoo!/Musicmatch. Is there code to abort if it detects iTunes? That seems less likely since the same version of Musicmatch was accepting of iTunes 6.
This is the kind of crap that we would have expected of Microsoft during the 1990s, using its market share to bully out the competition. Has Apple sunk so low? I want to like Apple. I want to buy and use their products, but they keep pissing me off. I don't want to fully convict Apple yet, but things don't look good.
Tags: apple, itunes, ipod, yahoo, musicmatch, monopoly
Tags: apple ipod itunes musicmatch
October 29, 2006 10:47 AM PST Permalink | Comments [15] |
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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