“Apple’s most direct competitor in the future won’t be Microsoft or Google, but Amazon.com,” Mike Elgan writes for Cult of Mac. “With the release of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Amazon.com declared war directly on Apple’s core business model, which is to sell integrated solutions for the consumption and creation of digital content. Starting Thursday, Apple strikes back.”
Elgan writes, “Apple devices do all the standard things that phones, tablets, laptops and desktops do, but Apple’s secret applesauce is that iGadgets are optimized on the low end for “consuming” content, and on the high end for creating it. Apple’s unique business model is to profit from the hardware, profit from the software and profit from the delivery of content to those integrated hardware/software devices.”
“In a nutshell, Apple’s goal is to do for all content what it did for digital music — control it,” Elgan writes. “It turns out that the very company that has declared war on Apple is the same company that currently controls book publishing… Apple will never compete with Amazon.com in a soup-to-nuts online bookstore scenario, where the core competency is making deals with every book publisher in existence and managing incredible inventories of paper books. That’s not a business Apple wants to be in. But the future of books — self-published authors selling electronic books to be read on digital devices. Well, that’s an Apple business.”In other words, Apple won’t compete with Amazon for the present of book publishing, but for the future… Thursday’s Apple event has been billed as an ‘education’ event. And I have the feeling that Apple is about to take Amazon to school.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
