Many Indians are more impressed by bill gates, but his thing is business models, which is not a bad thing, but in products, jobs is the true innovator. Actually jobs also invented disruptive business models with itunes, created whole new channel.
on sony android phone
7 comments:
Yeah, moving files to and fro iPad requires iTunes - now that's disruptive!
consider: why has the iphone become so popular? it's partly because of the apps. where do you get the apps? it's the app store. and what is the app store? it's itunes. in other words, apple created a whole new distribution channel, bypassing the microsoft windows distribution channel. that is, if you are a software developer, you no longer are tied to the PC/microsoft world to get revenues.
this is also true of digital music sales via itunes. who's the biggest seller of digital music in the world? that's right, it's apple. how has this affected apple's bottom line? they get 30% of the price of the music. is that good business for them? you bet.
many people find the importance of distribution channels hard to grasp. many of them work for big booksellers like borders. this would explain is why borders went bankrupt and amazon is so big these days.
Two big decisions that boosted Apple in recent years were both business related, not technology related. The first was the deal with the insecure music industry which agreed to sell its music to Jobs for a song (pun intended) when it was afraid of Napster and its clones. Remember that the iPod did not sell much until the deal with the music industry was made.
The second was its decision to open retail stores across the US, an action that has been copied by Microsoft.
We should not take away credit from either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. After Bill Gates outdid Steve Jobs by marketing an OS that could be separated from the hardware.
@Arvind,
Show me one digital music player that was better than iPod when it became a hit with users. My landlord's semi-literate maid from Guyana knew how to operate it.
Show me one phone that was better than the iPhone when it became a hit (well, even to this day). My friend, a life-time Apple hater, could not resist joining the bandwagon.
Not denying the power of ecosystem that Rajeev refers to but then iTunes was just a jukebox program initially. The iTunes store came a good two years later.
Apple is a good example of a company that kept its faith in products and has been rewarded for it. Bean counters don't understand the glory of product development and innovation and this is what ails America today.
@Inferno, I do not want to pass a judgment on the quality of various products or compare them since I am not familiar with all of them. Besides, that part is subjective.
I am merely commenting on the sales of iPod. Check out my claim. It is true that the sales did not pick up for more than two years after the launch of iPod and then took off after the iTunes store was created.
@Arvind, here is the question: would the music industry come to do business with Apple if they didn't have a product that was a clear market leader? The said product did not fall from the sky. It came from Apple's years of investment in technology.
@Inferno: i give due credit to Apple for the quality of their products. my laptop is a macbook. my observation has nothing to do with that aspect. it is simply an observation of events. to answer your question, the music industry panicked and signed a deal with the first firm that offered to pay them. they have been very bitter about this deal.
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