“Just in its first few days, the launch of Apple Music has demonstrated that Apple can competently execute outside of its core hardware business,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “That has implications for its future ambitions in TV and automotive, as well as highlighting the vast gulf between it, Google and Microsoft.”
Dilger writes, “If Apple’s success with Apple Music can offer some insight into its prospects for successfully launching TV and automotive products, as well as expansions of today’s Apple Pay, Apple Watch, home automation, health and ResearchKit initiatives, the same can conversely be said about Google’s track record of bungling Google TV, Glass, Google Wallet, Android Wear, Android@Home and its future prospects for Android Pay, self-driving cars and another crop of Glass and Android TV attempts.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Inc. vs. Our Lady of Perpetual Beta (or Our Lady of Transitory Endeavor). Forget about Microsoft, they’re done ruining personal computing for the masses.
Was at a beach party for the Fourth. The guys were all retired, successful technology business owners. We discussed Tesla, the promise of graphene, solar and battery infrastructure evolutions, Mars One – in short , some of the most exciting current changes in American technology.
Microsoft was not mentioned once.
Doesn’t sound like Apple was mentioned either?
We did discuss the APP revolution.
I agree with the thrust of the article but two points need to be made clear:
1) Apple had better have some expertise in music which is outside their core hardware business. They paid 3 billion for Beats.
2) They need to watch out of stuff like “they don’t need to make money on Music”. This kind of thinking is against laws of monopolistic behavior. A large company cannot use its dominate position in one area to force others in a different area out of business. This is what the Microsoft antitrust suit was all about: they used their operating system dominance to muscle out Netscape. As Apple has become one of the largest companies on the planet, their low market share in total numbers of phones, hardware, and operating system usage can no longer be an excuse.
I would say your business experience is sorely lacking. Yes Apple bought Beats and yes Microsoft was found guilty.
Sadly Apple got charged for what it did not do and Microsoft bought its way out of its loss.
There is almost NO justice in this world today.
“they don’t need to make money on Music”
I don’t think this is where Apple is headed with this, nor what they’re saying. Apple is in a weird space where they can take things like music and relative to their overall business, there’s simply little money to be made… The entire retail revenue globally for all music (physical and digital) was just under $14 Billion last year.
That’s just not that much relative to their other businesses.
But it doesn’t need to be that much, because providing a good music service enhances the ecosystem and brings people to where the real money is.
You’re right, that there could be legal implications if Apple were leveraging a monopoly to run their music business at a loss, but that’s not what they’re doing (either the first or second part).
What they are doing is taking that $14 Billion dollar industry, dividing it by their market share, taking 30% or so, and then paying expenses. It’s profitable, and enviable by many others in the industry, but it’s a very minor share of Apple’s overall profits.
The value isn’t in the profit, it’s in the customers.