Caples says I jinxed cloud music service, Lala...

Well, maybe I did…In my original post, from almost exactly one year ago, and which is basically a visceral reaction to a phone conversation I had w/Caples’ and his stubborn arrogance about the service’s superiority, I make the following points (I’m paraphrasing myself here):

• The idea of the .10c offer w/an upsell opportunity is flawed, a micro micro payment…lame.
• No iPhone app, and why would I pay to stream a collection I already own? Ah…Pandora anyone?
• As my pal Tim Wilson used to say when we were at Boris, this is about the integration story…which Lala didn’t really have.

So I’m sorry to have jixed the service Caples…But wait!

Lest we not forget that Apple acquired Lala…And at the time of the announced shut down, Wired speculated about the reasoning behind it…

While Apple’s hardware has embraced the cloud since .mac (now Mobile Me), its iTunes software lags far behind. Today’s news, while unfortunate for Lala users, represents good news for iTunes users, because it’s a sign that iTunes too could be headed for the cloud, obviating their need to manage music collections manually between multiple devices.

Yah, I guess…I can already manage music collections locally on my network via Home Sharing…And that feature doesn’t make music in the cloud a killer app.

Lala’s interface was pretty bitchin’…And it was clear they understood the consumption model…Particularly with regard to their relating owned songs to songs or artists of potential interest to their users…So perhaps the purchase was just Jobs following up to a fan-boys comment about owning all the engineering talent in the Valley…

In a follow up email, Caples threw out his reasoning for liking the service, again dissin’ the cloud as not that important:

For me, the cloud stuff on Lala wasn’t that important…I liked the cheaper download prices and the higher bitrates, the social media capability (sharing playable album or song widgets on facebook), and the possibility to buy CDs through them if you were so inclined.

Matt Rosoff over at Digital Noise posted his thoughts, making the point that the music industry hates “digital lockers” and that not letting users stream the stuff is bad mojo:

If you persistently refuse to let customers use your product in the way they want to use it, they’ll stop buying it. Ten years of stiff revenue declines in the recorded music business should have made that lesson clear.

Yah, again, I don’t think this is about streaming for Apple…Or for the consumer…How long as Rhapsody been pushing a subscription model from the cloud? Like 12 years? Ah…still not catching on…No, IMHO, this was about the acquisition of talent by Apple, and using that talent to improve their existing products…And perhaps their existing streaming content line…Certainly work to be done…

Anyway…Sorry Caples…While I only embedded one album into one post…I do kinda miss having the option. C’est la Apple.

W/the stock doing as well as it is, it just hit $240, up from $220 only 30 days ago…I wouldn’t want to burn any good will with the Apple community just to show off a dot release, unless it was pretty major…the running of multiple apps simultaneously would be the most sought after feature…

That said, maybe this is more of the dis-information strategy from the team out in Cupertino and knowing 4.0 will be a disappointment to end users and the street…Better to take the hit now while you’re running hot, giving APPL time to recoup from the potential damage…or turn shite into shineola…

I’m sure you’re all following this more closely than I, but depending on which cloak and dagger analyst you’re listening to, target is now $270-$300 for APPL – I’m calling this a HOLD medium term (hee hee, just fun to talk like an analyst) until they ship new a Verizon phone – at which point they very well may hit $300…seems fantastical as I recall the 1996 Wired Magazine cover w/the word “Pray” and a thorny crown around the rainbow Apple logo…moreover I wish I still had the email I sent to friends in 1998 telling them to buy APPL @ $9…*crying* if only I had taken my own advice! My $1,000 sell off from my vested shares of M100 would have been worth like $250K! *Sobbing*…

If for some reason, Verizon doesn’t happen…I would sell @ anything above or equaling $250 short term, …as all bets are off, but APPL will have passed it by then I’m reasonably certain…and if they do the dutch w/Verizon…and continue to drive the surface computing, web standards and mobile markets…who knows where APPL may land…and what is all this talk about APPL challenging GOOG/MSFT on search? I don’t see it…if GOOG were smart, they would stick to their core business…I don’t get a warm feeling when I think of Android OS devices…but truth be told I haven’t used one yet either…

Hum…maybe they’ll announce Verizon today? Would certainly keep the momentum going! Enjoy the show.

1. The Week has a nice time line from 2002 – 2010 covering a good selection of hearsay and third-party conjecture

2. Down in Oz, Garry Barker has some astute thoughts…comes close to discussing analog of music to publishing

and finally:

3. MacWorld’s Jason Snell offering a solid parsing of potential Apple thinking re: digital content delivery on a tablet

Let me offer this to the collective speculation; I believe the splashy color on the Apple event invite is a sort of shot over the Amazon Kindle bow…meant to at the very least poke fun at the device’s limited display. That said, I fear the iTablet may simply be a content consumption device…with a price-point just below Kindle…and a fairly limited hardware/software feature set a la the iPod Touch…could be?

Nah…w/the amount of time and consideration that Apple has put into the device, the content it may serve and the existing market dynamics…I’m going to predict a much more powerful and empowering 10″ monolith. And I wouldn’t be surprised to hear “Thus Spoke Zoroaster” from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as SJ has the drape lifted off, both arms tracking horizontally…wait for it…I give you, The “Jesus Tablet”…What? Too much?

Frankly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the actual hardware and software feature set…I’ve been thinking more about the content…and as I mentioned above, several folks have noted the analog between the music and publishing industries…how engines like Napster and the MP3 removed the optical key, namely the Compact Disc, from “The Man’s” distribution equation…and how the slow the music business has been to realize Pandora has left the box…

And around the same time, 1997 or so, I recall thinking to myself…”Wow, I can read the New York Times for free online? OH and better yet, I can filter the content I want from their stream and have it emailed to myself every day at no additional charge?” Well, why would I bust my chops scouring my collegiate burg to find a copy so I can buy and then read the damn thing? I never liked reading the physical paper anyway…always needing a windless room w/a 6′ round to lay the paper on, never properly folding the rag…and getting filthy with newsprint…I was much happier searching and forwarding articles and links…with an input device like a keyboard…yes, Bouv is a geek…you just noticed?

The now painfully obvious answer to the newspaper industry is that I wouldn’t hunt a copy of the newspaper down to pay for it…and never would again, in fact, I might not even read the free version of the paper handed to me by the concierge…and while yes…there is advertising revenue to be made in the free content model, The Times Companies couldn’t and I guess can’t figure out a way on its own to earn the $300,000,000 + to keep the global news room profitable…so onto the basic lines of the analog for Apple between music and newspapers…which Christopher Breen over at MacWorld has also briefly noted…

The Compact Disc is to the MP3 file as the newspaper is to the free online news website*…yah?

A valuable but ailing commodity (music) is broken into reasonably priced bits (songs or albums)…given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes)…Despite a wide range of competing free piracy solutions available to this day, Apple makes the end user experience more consistent, guilt and persecution free, oh and dare I say fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate music toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iPod! Cue the music…

Fast forward 8 years…So where does Apple fit in to the newspaper solution? In news, we have a similar revenue from content problem:

A valuable but ailing commodity (books, magazines, news items) can be broken into reasonably priced bits (stories, sections, e-books, e-magazines or a whole paper)…provided it’s given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes – now w/Bookstore)…where Amazon’s Kindle, NYT Online, or any other priced/free solution fall short at providing the complete ecosystem…Apple comes to the rescue by making the end user experience more consistent, easy to organize, and fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate reading toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iTablet…cue the music…purchased of course from the ITMS…

A stretch? Perhaps…maybe Apple will simply offer us an e-Ink “in color” tablet that only displays books/newspapers and then tries to charge us $999…Barely a mini-woot…More a “ho-hum”. Yah, ah…I don’t think so…SJ isn’t going to come out, waste his (now very valuable) time and throw a color Kindle at us…

The most interesting thing about the potential iTablet to me isn’t the tablet…it’s how content will be culled, created and distributed via the device…to make it a true tool…giving publishers a way to get that content into the stream as fast as any other will be key…

Will it have global wi-fi? Will there be a content development template or SDK for an App store-like bookstore model? What ramifications are there for the iPhone/iPod touch community? Does this device now make all 100,000,000 + owners sigh a collective…”Shit…” when this thing is announced?

I doubt it…more likely, many of the reading tools will hopefully be available for those devices as well…Certainly a nice pitch to content owners/producers eh? “We have a rapidly growing install base of folks with these tools and 100,000,000 live credit card accounts…I think we can help move some of your product…” not to mention potential ad revenues from the Quattro Wireless deal…again, a point made my the good chaps at MacWorld…it’s an interesting time to be a consumer for sure…anyway…looking forward to seeing SJ out there…If the start of 2010 is any indication, my gut tells me he still has at least one more trick up his mock-nerk sleeve… – Bouv.

*Don’t forget the fact that the NYT and the lot, save Murdoch’s WSJ and a few others have been giving the content away for 12+ years…and previous attempts to put Pandora back in her box have failed…anyone remember NY Times Select?

Congratulations, that’s 1000 stolen strategic plans! Their customers may become confused when they accidentally wander into an Apple store looking for support for Microsoft products…oh well…Apple will probably still help them out…

The Apple Invite for today's iPod event.

9 to 5 Mac is reporting that Apple will finally offer The Beatles catalog through the iTunes music store.

The Rock and Roll event scheduled for later this afternoon EST (1PM I think)…may also bring a new set of iPods, modifications to iTunes and AppleTV along with a possible appearance by Steve Jobs…but no confirmations yet…my fav site MacSurfer will have all the places for updates…but for now, the Apple Online store is closed for business…always a good sign new items are about to arrive in inventory…

"Oh we'll be doing applications, don't you remember? We had lots of them..."

Ok, so believe it or not…there were smartphones before the iPhone…in fact, PALM had made quite a few of them…prior to my owning an iPhone, I owned no less than 4 Palm devices…2 of which were smartphones…the Treo 600 and the 650…both of which were handy devices…in fact, for note taking, IMHO, they were better devices than my iPhone…which I still can’t import those notes into w/out a mod…that said…the iPhone blows the Treo away on almost all other counts…as soon as APPL made their phone available…and I managed to get my hands on one…I sold both the iPod and the Treo…because I was sick of having to carry around mulitple devices…

Fast forward to ah…yesterday. As soon as Palm announced their Pre product…I signed up for the mailing list…wanting to make sure I could understand what the product might bring to the table…so far it seems to be mostly marketing promises…Palm has a talented team…I believe they do get mobile and touchscreen usability…and IMHO competition for the iPhone is healthy…will provide for better products all around…but these situational videos that Palm has created just hit me the wrong way…They’re attempting to be aspirational…but they strike me as stiff…the feature set, apart from the true multitasking isn’t that sexy…and if I had to put a wager down today…I’d say that Apple won’t be waiting by the sidelines to see what Palm’s next play will be…I suspect on June 8 @ WWDC, in a hail of a possible Jobsian glory, SJ may rise from the dead and reclaim his seat on the throne as King Geek, delivering a thunderclap revision to the iPhone product that leaves the Pre stillborn. Or maybe they’ll just ship iPhone OS 3.0…either way…Pre is going to have a hill to climb…

MobileCrunch has a very good post re: today’s iPhone 3.0 software update, including a citation of definite cut and paste from Mr. Kevin Rose himself on a recent SXSW Diggnation episode:

Certainly cut and paste will be the big news…there is also some talk about a possible tablet.

Props to MobileCrunch for the printable scorecard! I can only hope that the software is available immediately. I must have been really busy to miss this announcement on the wires…

Jason Snell waxes bitter.

In this weeks MacWorld newsletter…longtime editor Jason Snell waxes on re: Apple’s decision to dump MacWorld Expo.

Most of his points follow the common thinking…

1. The announcement may have been a cover for SJ’s ailing health.
2. Apple is sick of having to pull the curtain off of new products along IDG’s schedule.
3. Apple Stores are like Mini-MacWorld show floors.

The one that gets me is the “fans are owed better than” argument…to quote Jerry Maguire, “this ain’t show friends…it’s show business…” So very true…MacWorld may well be better off w/out Apple…as Mr. Snell suggests…but Apple owes nothing to the fans that attend MacWorld…other than the continuing development of fantastic consumer experience.

The Apple Creative Pro case study for doc "Wisdom".

The Apple marketing team does a very nice job with the case studies, this latest one…on a documentary focusing on life lessons called Wisdom by director Andrew Zuckerman dovetails nicely into the Apple milieu. Check out the videos…