http://www.cnbc.com/id/100717516
Apple blew it.
Isn't it interesting that the Cupertino company is replicating the flaw of the major labels, holding on to a past paradigm, a veritable cash cow, until it is trumped by somebody living in the future.
Streaming is now. The only people who don't know it are the consumers. Don't listen to what they do or do not want, they're clueless. They're streaming on YouTube today, but are too stupid to see this is how they're going to get their music tomorrow.
Who's gonna win?
Spotify, Rdio, MOG/Daisy?
Only one. There's only one winner on the Internet. One Amazon, one Google... Healthy competition is for brick and mortar, online it's a scorched earth policy, he with sharp elbows who spends and leads and never sleeps wins. Like Amazon. The financials are not great, but by time they're done, Amazon is going to own the world, have you heard about their coming 3-D mobile phone?
Amazon is straight out of Clayton Christensen. The first iteration often sucks, but then they end up delivering what's good enough, at a cheap price. The Kindle Fire is virtually unusable, a bicycle compared to the Ferrari of the iPad, but it's priced right and people don't know what they cannot do.
Yup, idiots don't sit at home frustrated their new cheap tablet won't do this or that... They're too stupid to do this or that. They're not power users... This is how Apple surrendered the lead in smartphones, by making something for the elite power user and abandoning the underlings, who were ultimately satiated by Android, which they can get for no money down. Cheap Android has conquered the world. And it gets better every day. Albeit laden with malware and usability issues.
But, as stated above, most people don't use these phones for much. iPhones are where the heavy traffic is. But for how much longer?
Yup, Apple is ceding market share.
Oh, don't be a fanboy and tell me they've got all the profits. That's true. But
Apple became a behemoth via market domination, that's what the iPod was all about, we own the sphere and you can't get in. And it worked for a while in phones, but then came Android.
And the ancient iTunes Store is ten years old and profitable, but Apple refuses to kill it with a streaming service, hell, they're busy trying to imitate Pandora!
It's not the same Apple...
Apple dominated because of the connector. The thirty pin jobby you see in all hotel rooms. They went to Lightning and suddenly, accessory makers balked, they're going to Bluetooth.
And maybe this would have happened anyway, but if you think Apple just announces a streaming service and wins, you can't see that Apple is no longer dominant. There's that Android problem... Imagine if Apple had streaming music before Android launched! They could have done that, they could have dominated, but NO! They rested on their laurels.
You've got to look ahead, you've got to kill competition that most people can't even see.
So Apple announces its streaming service and fanboys buy it and then...
Everybody else ends up where everybody else is, one of the competitors.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Only one wins. You win by being better than everybody else and continuing to dominate. Like Amazon, you start to eat your competition from the bottom, by doing what they do, like streaming movies, for a cheaper price. You strive to be one stop shopping.
How many Facebooks are there? Heard about Justin Timberlake's MySpace recently?
OF COURSE NOT!
Facebook may not be forever, but it's winning now.
Does Twitter have a competitor?
So busy selling bonds and giving dividends, Apple is avoiding the future. Where's the killer instinct, where's the risk?
The company was built on dominance and it's losing power every damn day.
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