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could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different
machine, and locked them out of their own music.
There is no market demand for this “feature.” None of your
customers want you to make expensive modifications to your
products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And
there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving
than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic
technology failures.
I speak from experience. Because I buy a new PowerBook every
ten months, and because I always order the new models the day
they’re announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means
that I hit Apple’s three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty
early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars’
worth of iTunes songs I’d bought because one of my authorized
machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one
was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom’s
computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto.
If I had been a less good customer for Apple’s hardware, I
would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evange-
list for Apple’s products — if I hadn’t shown my mom how iTunes
Music Store worked — I would have been fine. If I hadn’t bought
so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and
re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I
would have been fine.
As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism, and out-of-
control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out
of my own music, at a time when my PowerBook was in the shop
— i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to
Apple.
I’m an edge case here, but I’m a
leading edge
case. If Apple suc-
ceeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until
even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and
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