“Steve Jobs is legendary for a relentless, driving style that has helped him disrupt more industries than any other chief executive of his generation,” Yukari Iwatani Kane and Jessica E. Vascellaro report for The Wall Street Journal. “The question now: Is his successor, Tim Cook, aggressive enough to muscle Apple into new turf like TV and publishing where the company hasn’t yet established a dominant foothold?”
“An immediate challenge for Mr. Cook will be to advance Apple’s plans in what is expected to be a key market for growth: digital video,” Kane and Vascellaro report. “Apple is working on new technology to deliver video to televisions, and has been discussing whether to try to launch a subscription TV service, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“Mr. Jobs often criticizes, in public and private, the experience of watching TV as clumsy and bad for consumers. But he has said the existing system, where consumers get content from different cable and satellite providers that use different technologies, makes it difficult to innovate,” Kane and Vascellaro report. “Both he and Mr. Cook have called Apple TV, a box that allows consumers to watch media from iTunes and a few other online video services, like Netflix Inc., on TVs, ‘a hobby.'”
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Kane and Vascellaro report, “In 2009, Apple tried rounding up media companies to offer a bundle of TV shows for a monthly fee through iTunes, according to people familiar with the discussions. But it tabled the talks after few showed interest… People who have worked with Mr. Cook at Apple say that he often arrives at the same conclusion as Mr. Jobs, albeit with a lower-key approach. Suppliers who have dealt with Mr. Cook’s team say he is a formidable negotiator, and his team haggles down the price of parts to the half a penny.”
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