Thinkcorps

Sometimes, you just can’t let it go. I’m jotting all this down for my benefit, since I see the Apple music story becoming one of those hardy tech journalism perennials, like the “DSL/cable” is the best stories that seem to oscillate every 6 months.

So, without further ado, Businessweek on Apple.

“Apple is once again in the business of changing the world”
I love my iPod, but seriously. It’s not that radical. It’s the natural shrinking of components and increasing power/$ that’s always driven PCs. A large-scale community sharing dynamic playlists is much more radical (coupled with the celestial jukebox, a la Rhapsody).

“the trend may one day spell the end of the compact disk”
OK, seriously, people have been saying this for more than 10 years now. Give it a rest. Dis(c/k)s are great backup and transfer media. They’re the corrugated cardboard boxes of the digital space. They’re not supposed to be glamorous.

KEY OMISSION: Jobs has admitted that Apple doesn’t make any money from the iTunes store. Even revolutions need funding.

“Jobs’s other company, Pixar Animation Studios, is turning the movie business on its ear”
Pixar’s films have been huge hits of late, but hits are never guaranteed. Pixar also doesn’t pump out much footage per year. Too many animated features in a year, and the magic would tarnish quickly as Disney knows all too well. Pixar is extremely calculating in what it does. You can’t just franchise that into every film genre.

“He has the pieces”
WTF? I guess this is where the reporter got down on his knees. Apple is small fry in the computing business. iTunes makes no money and could be Napsterized in moments. Blockbusters are never guaranteed, as Pixar knows.

“Increasingly, content—that magical lifeblood of movie studios, record labels, and publishers—is being transformed into digital form. At the same time, the Internet and wireless networks are evolving to deliver those bits almost anywhere, at speeds never before possible. Couple all that with disk drives, semiconductors, and high-resolution displays that are growing ever smaller and more powerful, and technology is liberating entertainment from its past.”
I love starting a sentence off with “increasingly.” So awkward. “Transformed into digital form,” that’s 2 forms, buddy. Apparently, all these advances apply only to Jobs, and not the entire marketplace. Not Dell, Sony, Wal-Mart, nor a thousand other no-name Asian manufacturers. Just Steve.

“How we watch movies, look at photos, listen to music, even read a book promises to change profoundly in the next decade.”
Umm, seriously, the vast vast majority of America doesn’t know how their TV sets work. How does that change just because the set is digital? Truth—people will “watch movies, look at photos, listen to music, even read a book” exactly the same as we did before. If there’s differences, they ain’t gonna come from Jobs, they’re gonna come from the user community, and more specifically, they’ll come first from users tied to open source.

“One advantage Apple has over rivals is its retail stores”
Gateway said that too.

“Near term, an iPod for viewing digital photos would need nothing more than a color screen. Then, with its design skills, Apple could create a compact entertainment hub for the living room.”
AWESOME! Why didn’t someone think of this sooner?? :P I can’t wait to drive my family, relatives and neighbors to suicide while I regale them with my virtuosity on the piano, playing “The Entertainer” replete with electronic backup courtesy of Apple’s Garage Band.

“There’s no company in the world that’s better at making complex technology simple”
Jobs said this, and I actually agree. But read it again. Again. Yeah, “complex … simple.” How complex can something that you do while resting on your ass truly be? Seriously, America is a fat people. If listening to music was really complex, we’d see a lot more stairclimber accidents. BTW, aren’t there hundreds of competing MP3 players on the market right now?

“Apple’s iPod mini, a $249 player introduced on Jan. 6, is a lower-priced version of its current hit.”
Umm, some would argue that $50 isn’t really all that lower for a device with less than a third of the storage.

Next Story: Which Format Will Win?

“Is there a difference between the music sold at different music sites? No, the music is the same. But each song you buy off the Net comes wrapped in two important pieces of software: copy-protection software to prevent piracy and compression technology so it can be downloaded quickly. This combination is called a format.”
Do you think perhaps that when someone asks if the music is “different,” they actually mean, you know, “in general.” Just curious. So, the music is the same, but it’s different. Perhaps someone from Apple should have written this article. They are the experts on making the complex simple, after all.

“It’s only when people start buying music online that they may run into compatibility problems”
Except of course if you’ve ripped your music collection into WMA files, then buy an iPod. Hey, those folks at Apple are good, but they’re not magicians people! There are limits.

“Even then, you end up with lower-quality music because MP3 lacks the fidelity of new compression software.”
Totally wrong. The reason you get lower-quality music is because your that song you downloaded is already in a lossy format, recorded at a suboptimal bitrate. When you transcode lossy to lossy, you’re losing even more fidelity. So, basically, it’s your fault for buying crappy merchandise in the first place.

“Will there end up being one standard for digital music? Yes, eventually.”
Wow, talk about prescient. Where’s the burning bush? News flash: there’s no need for a format to win, since decorders will all be software based, a necessity in multifunction digital devices (you can’t stick in a chip for every format and keep the device small/cheap). The most open formats will win, look at the success of MP3. If there’s ever any trouble, people will simply shift to Ogg Vorbis, Divx, Xvid, or any number of open source alternatives that are being build into hundreds of devices already.

The Awful Truth

I think the iPod mini is a huge misstep. Apple doesn’t need another hard-drive player, they need a flash memory player. They also need to make iTunes work with multiple players and (notably for the mini) subsets of your stored music database. Who has only 4GB of music anyway? Regardless, you’re gonna end up filling up your iPod, and then you have to manage it manually, which sucks currently. Worst of all is the time and money wasted on the mini that could have been better spent on some of that innovating everyone’s talking about.

As far as openness goes, Apple’s never been too good at this. For a company who’s new OS is built on BSD, they’re not too open source friendly. It’d be good to see support for Ogg and others. The format of the music should be irrelevant to the player (and the user).

The iTunes music store is great and all, but again, it makes no money and consumes resources. I doubt it’s even profitable when you add in the incremental iPod sales it’s brought in. As I mentioned, the store could be Napsterized in a matter of moments. Public/Private P2P and CD/DVD/HD sharing will keep the illegal music flowing and it’s not going to stop.

Finally, people laugh at them now, but no-name Asian manufacturers are turning out some really interesting products. (I’ve mentioned this in a past post.) They are riding the leading-edge trends in manufacturing, and aren’t saddled with annoying marketing or legal departments. Their products are coming off the line with just about every port and format support you can think of. And they’re getting better. These are the guys to watch out for, ‘cause they’re going to be making everything you see in Wal-Mart’s electronics dept’s. Wait and see.