chano

Apple's Next Big Content Push?

You miss an important point despite your 'long history' with Apple.
I posited the same idea several weeks ago concerning Podolny's extraordinary move to Apple. I was the first to do so at a time when all the so-called experts struggled to understand this inexplicable departure from academia and arrival at Apple.
Jobs may be committed to profit, quelle surprise? So, this is bad?
He is also committed to exceptional value.
Even more, he is committed to democratising content distribution. Lowering the cost of ownership while allowing consumers to choose only the items they want, not a track more. In this way, especially with CD tracks, a lot of wheat is being bought and a lot of the chaff remains, rightly, unsold.
In education, iTunesU provides the same model. Take the content that owners want to publish and sell it for a very low price. It provides Academia with a way to repurpose their content for sale to an otherwise inaccessible market. Each U makes more money than it could imagine from a resource it never thought of repurposing for sale. Apple makes loadsamoney ($3+ billion in 2008 anyone?). Buyers get content of (sometimes) inestimable value for a small outlay.
I would call that Win-Win-Win.
It is possible to make a lot of money doing good and democratising a market like higher Ed.
I can see millions of people lining up to subscribe to such a new service floated out of iTunes and made fully commercial.
Did you say you elsewhere that you were an MBA? Is that for Maximum Bullshit Artist btw?
I would call your article simplistic. I've made the same observation about you before. Hmmm.