28 Feb 2010
DRM Madness
When Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Music letter, it generated a lot of noise. But I think that businesspeople like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Meg Whitman, Eric Schmidt, Carly Fiorina, and many others have a ton of experience and things that come as a shock to the industry are probably things they could predict a couple years before those things happened.
Give me that last point for the sake of argument, and then I’d like to ask: would it be reasonable to assume that Steve Jobs wasted his time and energy supporting DRM for iTunes?
I don’t think so, and the reason is that the music industry probably trusted Steve a hell of a lot more after he’d shown that he was willing to not only listen, but fully get behind their piracy concerns, even he if knew they were not legitimate concerns. It’s an interesting strategy, and ended up being more effective than indicating at the outset that DRM didn’t really help anything(although the fact that he had the data about the number of songs purchased per iPod compared to the capacity of iPods was probably helpful).
So, if you need something from someone, and are looking in directions 180 degrees apart, it might help to commit to their viewpoint for a short period of time - and who knows - you might be wrong :-)
