During a secret meeting with Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, listed the “obsolete” technologies that were thrown away when making Apple newest invention, the iPad. Reporting on this meeting Ryan Tate of the Business Insider mentioned the following technologies: Flash – the Web animation software, floppy disks, old data ports (including Apple’s FireWire 400), LCD screens and CDs. Surprisingly DRM (Digital Rights Management) did not appear on the list.

Apple Logo

It was Jobs that only three years ago, wrote in his famous blog post, “Thoughts about Music”, “If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies”. The rest was history. In the following year after the publication of this blog post, iTunes and then the rest of the Web based music stores became “DRM Free”.

3 years have passed. The issue is no longer music but rather eBooks, applications (aka “apps”) and videos. Surprisingly content protection and DRM are no longer persona-non-grata in Apple kingdom. Apple as well as others in the market, realized that the battle to protect illegal copying is almost lost (that was the essence of Jobs article in 2007), however it was a mistake to classify DRM as a copy protection technology. DRM is the technology that enables a large number of business cases and helps content stores differentiate themselves with different business models.

Today no one launches content service without the ability to offer subscription service in addition to the traditional “download to own” model, and the ability to share the content between different consuming devices of the same owner. All of these business models are enabled with DRM.

So Apple ditched lots of “obsolete” technologies but somehow the DRM technology that Jobs “obsoleted” in 2007, is still alive in kicking in iPad of 2010.