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New product announcements from Apple are often greeted with unabashed glee from Mac users, and it was no different last week when Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the company would soon release an instant-messaging client called iChat.
For the most part, Macintosh fans seemed pleased by what little they could see of iChat. The program looks cute and has some innovative features for managing contacts. It's also the first consumer chatter to receive AOL's permission to connect with that company's hugely popular AOL Instant Messenger system.
But in an interesting, unusual dialogue on some Macintosh-related sites, some people have expressed concern with news that Apple is adding yet another program to the stable of iApps included free in its new systems.
There are even comparisons between Apple's strategy and Microsoft's maligned practice of "bundling" applications with Windows. These comparisons provoked some discussion but were soundly rejected by many Apple lovers.
When iChat is released with a new version of the Mac OS later this year, it will sit alongside the music player iTunes, home-movie apps iMovie and iDVD, and a digital photo management program, iPhoto. These programs are all free, and iTunes, iPhoto and iChat perform tasks that were once the domain of third-party developers.
Apple also unveiled new features for its Sherlock desktop search application that are similar to those in Watson, a popular Mac program produced by a Karelia software.
This smorgasbord of Apple apps caused Rob McNair-Huff, the publisher of the popular Mac site Mac Net Journal, to accuse Apple of hurting independent developers and of "pulling a Microsoft."
Apple has been "bundling all kinds of programs with the operating system," he wrote on his site. "IChat is the latest announced incursion into another software category, following closely on the heels of Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto. And while this move steps into a software category where none of the chat clients are commercial programs, it really is no different than Microsoft pushing MSN or Internet Explorer as just another part of the operating system."
McNair-Huff was referring to Microsoft's inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows 98, the "bundling" that was a key concern of government attorneys who successfully prosecuted the company for antitrust violations in 2000. When Microsoft released Windows XP last year, similar worries were raised about its bundling of the MSN instant-messaging client in the OS.
"Apple should work with independent developers ... rather than taking everything in house," McNair-Huff wrote. "And as users and sometimes defenders of Apple, we all need to remember that this kind of move is the same kind of tactic that has landed the much bigger Microsoft in court. The difference here: Bundling is OK when you hold a 5 to 10 percent market share, but not when you hold a 90 percent market share."
The reactions to McNair-Huff's piece, expressed on the Web and in interviews, were neither knee-jerk nor especially indignant. Still, most people -- including developers who would likely be affected by Apple's new products -- completely disagreed with McNair-Huff, saying that even if Apple was bundling, they weren't all that mad with the company.
One developer of a competing free-chat client -- who requested anonymity -- said Apple was perfectly within its rights to release whatever it wants with its operating system and that comparisons to Microsoft were unfounded.
Apple is not "bundling," he said, because unlike IE in Windows, iChat can be completely removed from the system without affecting the computer's performance. The chatter isn't tied into the heart of the OS. It's merely an addition, and users aren't stuck with it.
This sentiment was echoed by Apple spokesman Bill Evans, who said the company didn't think of iApps as being part of the operating system. He noted that purchasing the operating system by itself does not include all the iApps included with the software. Only new Apple systems come with all the iApps, because Apple considers these programs essential to its computing experience.
But Evans' explanation offers somewhat of a distinction without a difference, considering that the company has the monopoly on both the Mac OS and Apple systems.
In order to use the Apple OS, consumers need to buy an Apple system from Apple; in order to use an Apple system, they need to buy the Apple OS from Apple. (For convenience, the system is itself bundled with the OS.) So, people who want to use an Apple will almost inevitably have iApps on their systems; and if they have the iApps, they could be unwilling to look for independent apps.
Adam Iser, the developer of a Mac chat program called Adium, said that he doesn't blame Apple for making a chat program, and he doesn't mind competing against iChat either -- as long as there's a "level playing field."
"IChat will (no doubt) be using Oscar, AOL's official, highly protected AIM protocol," Iser wrote in an e-mail. "This means that Apple has full access to all the AIM features, while the current run of third-party clients are left out in the cold, or must work endlessly to maintain flaky compatibility with AOL's over-protected servers."
Although AOL has always said that it wants to make its service "interoperable" with other chat services, the company has argued that there are significant technical hurdles to overcome before interoperability with other chat programs can be achieved.
Marty Gordon, a spokesman for AOL, said that iChat was not an "interoperable" chat program but rather one that had been developed with "true collaboration" between Apple and AOL.
IChat, Gordon said, "is an Apple product that works on our infrastructure. It's all happening on our server backbone."
He said that this was technically different from "server-to-server" interoperability, which is what Iser would need to connect his chat program to AIM.
Gordon refused to disclose the terms of the deal between Apple and AOL that allowed this unique collaboration to occur.
"My frustration lies squarely on AOL," Iser said. "By giving Apple full access to the Oscar protocol and all of AIM's features, while keeping Adium (and other third-party clients) trapped on the flaky, crippled (servers), AOL leaves Adium no chance at standing up against iChat."
Many developers argued a similar point: They don't mind that Apple is releasing its own programs but they don't want Apple's programs to benefit from certain proprietary features.
In that respect, McNair-Huff said he's pleased that Apple is giving developers full access to the address book that will be released in the next version of its operating system. Apple says that developers will be able to use address book data in their own applications -- and this will benefit Apple apps and third-party programs alike, the company said.
But Apple gave no word on whether it would grant developers access to the iChat interface.
Evans, the Apple spokesman, said that since the iChat is still at a "preview" stage, such decisions have not yet been made.
