[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> selling players. Apple was selling players and content.

Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
Sony's new MP3 players.

Jobs played on the fact that Apple only had 5% of the market and
couldn't possibly hurt the music and pitched his project more as a pilot
where record companies could gauge the impact. Once this proved to be
wildly succesfull, they deployed the Windows version of Itunes and sales
 not only went through the roof, they went orbital.


Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
so many applications.

It is very interesting because I have alwasy believed that Sony was the
one company who understood "convergence". Yet, they have never been able
to leverage this very well (but this may be coming now).


Yes, Jobs was "different". But during his second coming at Apple, he
seemed far more mature and normal.


What this does show is that the job of CEO is far more than that of an
administrator. It is really necessary for the CEO to either have vision
for the company (as in the case of Apple) or be able to delegate this in
the case of conglomerates like GE that have wildly separate enterprises.


> Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
> would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson and
> Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster. 

That is probably correct although I think that Napster scared the
bejesus out of the music industry instead of destroying it. Jobs says
that the music industry had tried to come up with a standard DRM but
couldn't even get that to work.  Apple stepped it with its own and got
lucky because it was the first to really integrate everything from music
sales to the devices.