UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

There is a good chance that you either own an iPod or have a friend who owns one. The iPod is one of the most successful consumer electronics devices ever released and is renowned for superior design and attention to detail. Unfortunately, some of the most basic features that should be present have been removed in order to appease the recording industry.

Have you ever tried to to copy all of your music on your iPod back onto your computer? You can’t. Apple goes to great lengths to make this as hard as possible even though many other mp3 players will let you do this without any problems.

This is classic uninnovation. Even when third parties have provided utilities to copy music off of iPods, Apple has spent lots of time and energy finding new ways to disable them:

“If you’re an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive lawyer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there’s more dough where that came from — they’ll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.”

Boing Boing: Apple to iPod owners: “Eat **** and die” — UPDATED

How much cheaper would iPods be if Apple wasn’t so devoted to fighting a losing battle?

For a case study in companies that are too big for their own good, look no further than Sony. Ever since Sony Electronics acquired CBS Records in 1988 and then Columbia TriStar in 1989, the company has been at odds with itself. Since 1989, Sony has been a company that produces not only media content, but also the devices that play content. This has created tension within the company to add ever more restrictive copy protection to Sony Electronics products and has resulted in some absurd cases of copy protection abuse. But perhaps no case is as historically important as the case of the Network Walkman.

By 2004, Apple’s iPod had emerged as the dominate portable music device with over 90% of the market. However, portable music devices had not saturated the mainstream and the overall market was growing rapidly. Sony was hoping reclaim the glory of it’s Walkman days by introducing a new portable music device that was smaller than the iPod and sported much better battery life. With what appeared to be great product and clever advertising building on the Walkman name, Sony had a good shot at gaining serious ground in an important new market.

Unfortunately, Sony decided it was more important to “protect” their record label interests than release a product that was useful. Much to the disbelief of the general tech community, Sony released the Network Walkman without the ability to play MP3 files and thus unable to play the vast majority of music content that consumers were likely to have. Instead, the MP3 files had to be converted to Sony’s proprietary format through a slow and arduous process that added extra copy protection to the files. The conversion software was unreliable and extremely limited in functionality. As a result, the NW-HD1 Network Walkman was soundly rejected by the general public and neither it nor later Sony products ever made a significant dent in the portable music market.

Sometimes it’s not even the device manufacturers who do the uninnovating. When Verizon announced support for the Motorola v710 cell phone, their subscribers were understandably excited. This was the first Verizon cell phone that had full bluetooth support. Users with a v710 and a bluetooth-enabled computer would be able to synchronize their Outlook calendars and address books to the phone, download pictures taken on the phone, and use the phone with wireless hands-free systems built into many newer cars.

Except when the users got the phones, something was wrong. The phone wouldn’t sync with computers, pictures couldn’t be transferred, and only a small list of supported hands-free systems would work. Almost all of the bluetooth functionality built into the phone was permanently disabled by Verizon. Instead, Verizon users had to pay extra on a per-use basis for add-on services to transfer pictures. No alternative was provided for the other missing features.

Users were understandably furious with Verizon. However, Verizon still refused to enable the missing features. Eventually, a class action lawsuit was filed:

“Verizon Wireless has enjoyed enormous financial gains by marketing and selling the popular Bluetooth v710 phone then disabling almost all of its Bluetooth capabilities, resulting in a degraded phone, which requires the customer to use other Verizon ‘paid’ services in place of the Bluetooth capabilities that were supposed to be part of the phone’s Bluetooth features,” the lawsuit said.

Verizon Wireless Users Sue Over Disabled Bluetooth Features