When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do.

The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks.

As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music.

Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value switching cost. I wonder how many of the increasingly ubiquitous iPod users even know that they can’t easily take their songs to a non-Apple product.

I expect that before long there will be court cases for Apple to display disclaimers on their products saying that they cannot move songs to a non-Apple environment, or cases to legitimize software that bypasses Apple’s DRM and converts songs to regular MP3.

By the time that these have dragged through the courts, Apple will have won. But the real irony is that it won’t be file sharing advocates pushing these cases, but the recording industry.

Apple holds the cards precisely because it and not the recording industry, controlls the DRM.

Ten years ago, I started a design company and our biggest client was Levis. Levis were trendy and they fed the trend by sposoring DJs and independent record labels and bands. We got the gig for Levis, in fact, because my business partner knew the manager of Massive Attack and Levis were involved in promoting Massive Attack’s climb to fame.

Five years Later, when I moved to the US, Levis was in the process of a big fall from grace - and the business guys blamed it on late outsourcing and bad design.

Last month, I noticed that a few trendy people were wearing Levis in NY, in an almost ironic anti-fashion way. A bit like the daft Trucker Hat fad.

When New York bounced back from its 70’s ‘Taxi Driver’ nadir, Giuliani was given credit for its revival, people proposed all sorts of theories, such as a trickle up effect from cleaning subway cars, others pointed out the obvious - perhaps its just a natural cycle.

This week Levis announced a 5 fold increase in profit for the quarter. No doubt people will laud their business acumen, but if the fortunes of an entire city can be cyclical then the fashion cycle of hipster to mainstream to hipster is almost certainly so.

I suspect the cult jean manufacturers True Religion and Seven for Mankind will shortly go the way of designer jeans after the 80s, and be adorning thrift shops everywhere. They are exactly out of phase will Levis.

APP.COM - Levi’s second-quarter profit jumps almost fivefold

Cooper to talk.

My guess is that Miller Gossiped, i.e. the leak went Judith Miller (NYT) -> Administration -> Cooper (Time) and Novak (WaPo).

Whether there is any evidence that Plame’s name went twice around the merry-go-round (Administration -> Miller) is another matter.

Whatever the scenario, what amazes me is that few people seem to question that this was a vindictive act rather than a cockup.

Ahem

The Internet Stock Blogoutlines the case that Yahoo is most likely to buy six apart, because “Yahoo! has no blogging platform”.

Dave Pell pointed out an interesting idea, that when a large company makes an acquisition in a particular area, then it is difficult for them to acquire a competitor to it, since there would be internal resistance or operational complications from the existing team within the company. Consolidation tends to happen on the outside.

On that basis, Google has Blogger and Microsoft has Spaces. So maybe Yahoo would buy Sixapart? Perhaps, since Google have Picasa, Yahoo could also buy Flickr.

With Sixapart and Flickr, Yahoo would have added two formidable services to their arsenal.

People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony.

There are many technologies that fail because they don’t pass the ‘good enough’ test.

Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right - it just works.

In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony.

Example one: a friend’s cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn’t work, couldn’t get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine.

Example two: a friend called via VOIP from India yesterday. The VOIP worked just fine, better than an Indian landline at $3 a minute, and when calling a US cellphone, it was the cell carrier that dropped the call.

VOIP is not only much much cheaper, but it is better.

Predictions for 2005:

1. Wikiyahoo - Tagging/Folksonomies become the tech talk of the town. Flickr gets acquired

2. Googlets - People cash out and leave Google, creating a startup frenzy in SF

3. An Englishman