[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 19, 11:51 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Don't take my remarks as offensive, but I was interpreting the
language of your post as that of a religious position before you used
the phrases "second coming", "bejesus", etc.

:-)

I, too, was a member of the Apple Religion until I became apostate
around the time the Mac moved from 68k to PowerPC (sure they provided
an emulator so you wouldn't need to flush your 68k s/w investment but
the emulator was crap and many people though Apple did it that way on
purpose; they did the same thing again when they jumped from PowerPC
to x86-64)

There's been lots of stuff written and said about Steve Jobs, but
everyone should watch this interview with Walter Isaacson by Charlie
Rose
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11962

I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs was unable to write a single
line of code. Talk about the Jobsian Reality Distortion field!!!

I was surprised to learn that he was such a big baby.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/11/why-steve-jobs-cried.ars

I was surprised to learn he was a first class prick. He traveled
around India with a good friend who became a very early Apple employee
but not a millionaire during the IPO. When another person approached
Jobs with a proposal to give this poor devil matching shares, Jobs
said "Sure, I'll match you. You give zero and I'll give zero". So much
for his Buddhism.

His belief he could "will away" cancer was just plain nutty. (or
Californian new-age)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201111112
His not washing or using deodorant speaks for itself.

I heard an interview last week where we heard that Steve Wozniak got
to view a video of Jobs touring the Foxconn plant where the iPhones
and iPads are manufactured. It showed people with crippled hands and
missing fingers but Jobs didn't appear to show any sympathy.
Apparently Wozniak left the video in tears.

I was upset to learn that he felt LSD use was responsible for his
talents. Even if this is true, I don't think it is something that he
(or Isaacson) should have publicized. Maybe one-in-ten-thousand would
benefit from this type of self-administered therapy but I am convince
the other 9999 would not with a much smaller number becoming the poor
devils who become society's drop outs.

His belief that Google's gPhone was an iPhone rip-off only proves to
me that he was under the impression that Apple had invented the phone.
Meanwhile, books like Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" tell us that Google
only went the gPhone route after Apple refused to allow the Google
Voice app (a skype like product) on the iPhone. Why? Apple had made a
back room deal with AT&T and GV would hurt AT&T's LD revenues.

###

With regards to Sony, while they had the technical ability to do
something like iTunes, they did not have someone with Jobs' Reality
Distortion Field who could convince Hollywood industry insiders that
this was in their best interests. Most people would agree that Jobs
could probably sell ice-cream to Eskimos.

Just my two cents worth

NSR