iTunes Music Store is a web service. Whether it delivers HTML or XML to a thick client is irrelevant. It still needs to deliver a tremendous volume of them in addition to managing the downloads. And by and large it has worked tremendously well.
iTools/.Mac etc are all the same thing just rebranding. Ping was a product failure not a technological one. And GameCenter/iMessage use iCloud so not sure why you listed them.
I'm sorry, but successfully running a digital download store in a desktop app does not impress me. Apple's innovations with the store were not technical but contractual (originally getting record labels to agree to flat per song pricing).
iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud are all the same thing, but signify the number of reboots they have had over the years. Each time they say "it's fixed!" and then yea, it's not.
Be my guest if you want to believe Apple is great at the web. Meanwhile Google will be feasting.
They have had lots of security problems, but yes it is successful. It's also slow and outdated. I have not built anything that size, but I'm also not the second most valuable company on Earth. My point was simply that other companies are better at the web than Apple is and that shouldn't be the case considering their resources and the importance.
LOL at taligent. Did you experience that particular Apple disaster? I think that also went in for a certain amount of pleading along the lines of "crap isn't really crap, you just aren't smart enough to understand how superior we are".
iTunes Music Store is a web service. Whether it delivers HTML or XML to a thick client is irrelevant. It still needs to deliver a tremendous volume of them in addition to managing the downloads. And by and large it has worked tremendously well.
iTools/.Mac etc are all the same thing just rebranding. Ping was a product failure not a technological one. And GameCenter/iMessage use iCloud so not sure why you listed them.