CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD
Go ahead and read Kara Swisher’s article, here’s the tl;dr version: Mike Arrington is an amoral douchbag.
(via Instapaper)
This is how I feel in many business lectures, even more so when over-enthusiastic students give presentations.
How Apple would approach making a TV
In the latest episode of Angry Mac Bastards, John Welch, Darby Lines and their lovely guest Kelly Guimont discussed an article from Business Insider, which cites UBS analyst Maynard Um titled “If Apple Television Is Next, Then So Is A “Genius Squad,” Says UBS”.
(The fun starts at time index 01:04:20)
They pulled the story apart pretty thoroughly, but there were two things in the article that got me thinking:
One newish idea from Um is that Apple will have to send out its geniuses to hook up Apple televisions in people’s homes. This would be another one of Apple’s competitive advantages, although Best Buy has a similar advantage.
and
What we envision of Genius Bar is similar to the Geek Squad, which is fairly well known in the US as Best Buy’s service department to facilitate technology adoption – television set installations, wireless router installations, repair services, content transfer from one PC to another, file backup, set-up services, general troubleshooting, tutorials, etc
Now to be clear: I don’t think Apple will or should build a TV, because this market is even more of a standard-resistant minefield than the cellphone business and the Apple TV seems to work fine for most people and helps Apple sell content.
Addressing Um’s two points —and talking entirely out of my ass here— this is what I think Apple would do:
- Build the device, the software and the packaging in a way that people won’t need help setting it up. In other words; make it idiot-proof.
- Get contracts in place with their favourite logistics providers that will have the delivery guy(s) carry the thing into the customer’s sitting room and maybe even heave it onto a wall.
The first thing is called intelligent design, which is something Apple seems to be really good at and the second thing is called outsourcing of non-integral tasks of the supply chain, something that Apple is also really good at.
Discussion about Apple's possible acquisitions
There’s a good discussion going on in the Ars Technica forums about what Apple could possibly want to buy with all the cash they have at hand.
Analysts — Stating the obvious since the inception of the stock market
What Mr. Whitmore is trying to sell as topical information, is something that was obvious to anybody who observed the development of the iPhone in the market and the iPod to a lesser extent.
The keywords for Apple are: Late Market Entry, R&D, Innovation, Mindshare, Profit Margin.
And Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.
When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”
Kara Swisher on All Things Digital.
I wouldn’t have agreed to a deal with Facebook, if I had been in Mr. Jobs’s position either. Facebook likes to own all the data they collect from users and its partners and do with it as they please.
Given that Ping will quickly become popular among the 160 Mio. credit card equipped iTunes users, it’ll give Apple terabytes of data on the listening preferences of its customers, which Apple’s marketing division will surely put to good use for the company.
It might even give Apple an edge — though probably not a necessarily long-lived one — over its biggest competitor in the field of digital music distribution, especially in negotiations with content providers.
