Apple & Singapore

Lately, the feud between Apple and RealNetworks over iPod technology has been drawing a lot of comparison to that of personal computers in the mid-1980s: on the verge of spreading from early adopters to the general population, led by Apple and run by Steve Jobs. This is indeed pretty similar to today's digital music scene; Apple's iTunes service has 70% of the market for legal music downloads and the iPod, 60% of the American market for high capacity, hard-disk-based players.

Critics point out that Mr. Jobs' refusal to share technology that would allow RealNetwork's Rhapsody users to download songs on to iPods displays a reluctance to make Apple's technology — its music format and copyright coding — an open standard. Could he be repeating the same mistake that had allowed Microsoft (which did license their inferior DOS system to other hardware makers) to build their Windows monopoly?

Just last week, RealNetworks announced that they had cracked Apple's technology and that Rhapsody users can use iPods after all. This ought to be good for Apple, which makes its money from iPods, not iTunes (which barely breaks even). RealNetworks denies any “reverse engineering”. Yet Apple may decide to sue Real. What on earth is Mr Jobs up to?

Enough of the Apple story, what has caught the eyes of Singaporeans lately is a technology column on the matter in USA Today by Kevin Maney.

Miller, also an accomplished musician, goes on to call Apple "the Singapore of computing."

You know Singapore: autocratic, insular, elegantly engineered, repressively controlled — and destined to never amount to more than a small but interesting dot on the world map.