Everyone’s talking about the Steve Jobs’s publicized call to end DRM and then boom — He gets EMI to drop their rights. Brilliant!!
What nobody is talking about is the timing of his call. Note that he has over 75% of the MP3 player market using a proprietary file format in a market where 90% of the songs that are playing on these proprietary devices were not paid for.
Notice he did not make this when his market share was at 20%! Brilliantly, he waits until he owns the brand category and then calls for openness. What’s left for Creative and the others are the crumbs. He makes money where it matters and everyone else provides the content for free.
Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch? His tactics are brilliant.