UPDATE: we got it completely wrong – the Apple update was to let the world know that the Beatles back catalogue was finally available on iTunes. Worthy of this kind of announcement?
If you go to www.apple.com, the whole page is an ad for an announcement tomorrow. Like this.
In true Apple style, they are hyping the PR in the (justified) hope that people will share and get excited. And that the free media storm will be a deluge.
So what is it going to be? If you’ve been following the industry press over the last 12 months, Apple purchased Lala (the music streaming service) last December and then killed it. Legend had it that Apple was buying Lala for her engineers and technology so that they could apply it to iTunes and create iTunes-in-the-cloud.
Streaming music services are not new. Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and even Pandora have been doing it for the last few years in one shape or another. Apple, having pioneered the iTunes way of selling music have apparently realized that streaming is the future, and bought the best engineers in the business to put it together for them.
We do have a bit of an anti-Apple bent at the Radar. We just don’t like the closed loop that they have created and the fact that they are trying to control what you read/listen to/ watch and how you do it, all under the guise of controlling the user experience. We are great believers in open source and despite its limitations, we believe that Android is the future. We just don’t like to be controlled by a single corporation…
Apple has been living on the back of its frankly amazing innovation, introducing next generation products and technologies to market, and making them ultimately usable. However, in recent times, it seems that Apple have started to copy innovation from other companies: Ping, taking the best of Facebook and Twitter and putting it into the iTunes platform (does anyone actually use Ping?) and now this. The funny thing is, this isn’t a new phenomenon. If you have a spare hour, read this simply fascinating story about the birth of iTunes, and Steve Jobs (legendary) negotiating style.
(rumours on other music blogs mostly point to the Beatles back catalogue becoming available on iTunes – still, this was a good opportunity to chat bug-bears)
The trouble with becoming the biggest company in the world is that innovation isn’t scalable to this degree. Microsoft, Oracle, Sun were all hugely innovative companies at the beginning. Scale defeats innovation, as Facebook and Apple are finding increasingly.
Anyway, we could be completely wrong on this. Feel free to disagree…