Will anything upset the dominance of Apple in the music market? In the short term, probably not. The iPod isn’t a product, it’s an industry and music consumers have become used to the excellent combination of device, software and channel that Apple has provided. In the long run though, Apple will not be able to maintain its dominance. Here’s why:

1. Apple is not going to dominate DRM. Microsoft probably is. I feel uneasy about being too positive about Microsoft technology, but there is no denying that Microsoft did a really excellent peice of technical work on DRM. And it has the advantage that it owns the OS that most video will play on. If Sony puts a root-kit on your PC then we all cry foul, but Microsoft can put anything it wants on your PC. This gives it a huge advantage over other DRM providers except for Apple. But the television and movie industry is not going to wait for Apple to become dominant in the PC market. Microsoft will have its piece of the action and this will put Apple in a far more competitive position than it currently is. It will not dominate video like it dominates music. It will be a shared market.
2. Apple’s dominance of music is under threat anyway. The point is simply this. The mobile phone carriers and manufacturers of this world are not going to donate their industry to Apple. All that is required to upset the Apple cart is software that can out-iPod the iPod on a mobile phone.

It exists and it’s British. Are you serious Bloor?

Well yes, actually. Long time associates of mine and software industry heavyweights of long standing Rob Lewis, Phil Sant and Mark Knight have been nurturing a start-up called Omnifone. Now it has product and, technically, it’s very impressive. Put simply, it’s software that plays music on a mobile phone. I know these guys. This is not a dim-simple MP3 player. Sticklers for technical elegance, they’ve gone and designed it as self-configuring so that it optimizes its foot print and runs on anything. It has a pretty interface. It has parallel downloading. DRM is built in. Am I boring you yet?

It is British, so it must be great technology that goes nowhere? Well perhaps, but as things stand, operators that collectively have more than 50 percent of the world mobile market have signed up with Ominfone as development partners.

And what does this mean for Apple? It means that Apple is going to run very fast to maintain its share of the music market. It means that Apple’s real iPod phone needs to be very compelling. It probably will be, but Apple’s share of the music market is set to decline anyway.