As a former Windows person, I was shocked when I upgraded my MacBook to OSX Leopard. There was no DRM! No registration, no activation, no serial numbers to send in. Just install it and go. I could have easily bought one copy and installed it on all my Macs, if I had more than one. I didn’t think much about it until today, when I saw this article by Joe Wilcox in eWeek.
According to eWeek: “Mac OS X 10.5 Family Pack accounted for about one-third of Leopard retail sales during the product’s first month in market. Apple released Leopard at the end of October. Apple sells a single desktop version of Mac OS X, which is available for $129; a family pack for up to five PCs in the same home sells for $199. … Something else different about Apple’s strategy compared with Microsoft’s: Trust. Apple uses no activation or validation processes. Apple’s anti-piracy mechanism is trust. Maybe that strategy is working for Apple. The family pack has increasingly grown as a percentage of Mac OS X sales, all based on end users’ willingness to pay more and do the right thing. There is no compulsion, as they could easily pay for one copy and install it on more than one Mac. On Friday, my Office 2007 failed validation, meaning that Microsoft marked my copy as counterfeit. Later on, a Microsoft diagnostic utility mysteriously fixed the problem. Fixed or not, the validation failure was a bad customer experience. Microsoft’s approach is presumption of guilt. Apple’s approach presumes customers will be honest.”
Hmm….. I wonder if any of the publishing houses are as profitable as Apple, and I wonder if Apple knows something they don’t.
Apple is hardly the sterling example you cite. Consider the controls they use to limit music and video purchased from the iTunes store. Consider their antipathy for would-be developers of iPhone add-on software. Consider their crack commando squad of lawyers roving the countryside issuing take down orders and suing popular websites into oblivion. More to your point, consider if one day you would like to use that Leopard license on a virtually identical Dell computer that is perfectly capable of running it, but for the fact that Apple cripples their OS so you must also buy their hardware.
They don’t have DRM on the OS because they don’t make their money off the software, they make it off the hardware. Apple is a hardware company.
True, they are becoming a service company as well, but they are first and foremost a hardware company.
You’re sort of comparing Apples and well… oranges here.
Because OS X is tied to a specific hardware platform only sold by Apple the percentage of folks that are going to be able to take advantage of a pirated copy of the OS is pretty small.
If one could run OS X on any Intel based pc would Apple still behave the same way in regards to how OS X is sold? I doubt it.
It is a lot easier to seem magnanimous when you have a much smaller (almost insignificant) percentage of the global pc market AND your OS is tied to your specific hardware. I also think Steve Jobs is willing to take a small financial hit just to take a dig at Bill Gates.
On the other hand Apple sells their amazing Final Cut Studio 2 software package for $1299 and as far as I know it does have a mandatory activation process. Why? Don’t they trust their customers??
Also, why is it a surprise that so many people willingly buy a family pack when they could get by with a single copy? Most people, most of the time are honest in most matters.
However, when it comes to books there is a long cultural tradition of sharing books with others. Do any of us really believe that if publishers were to start flooding the market with titles that are free of DRM and that are in a “universal” format that can easily be shared (aka copied) amongst most any device/platform that there will be the same readiness on the part of most people to pay whatever price the publisher sets? I doubt it.
Another way of looking at it is that Apple is a consumer electronics company, whereas Microsoft is a business software company. Apple’s interested in good experiences for consumers with their (Apple) electronics, so that they’ll come back and buy more; Microsoft’s interested (apparently) in backward compatibility with software companies wrote or acquired up to 20 years ago.
“If one could run OS X on any Intel based pc would Apple still behave the same way in regards to how OS X is sold? I doubt it.”
Then they would be a software company, not hardware.