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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2017-06-28, 03:29

I think there's legitimate worry that the Apple Music division, particularly its content apparatus*, is culturally a poor fit for Apple. I'm not sure it's easy to marry the two in any case.

And perhaps this is a striking example where the two particularly clash. You have one culture with a vested interest in a healthy developer ecosystem. Ultimately, it mainly wants to sell hardware, but it benefits from third parties enriching the software platform. (This doesn't always work so well — see, for instance, Apple not prioritizing making high-end pro apps more feasible on iOS.)

Then you have another culture that really doesn't care about any of that and just wants to sell content subscriptions. Planet of the Apps isn't about the craft of creating software, it isn't about the pitfalls of being a developer, it isn't educational or informative; like any ol' reality show, it's chiefly about eyeballs. That's a fairly muddled message.

The only way they could've made that conflict worse is giving a major segment in this year's WWDC keynote to that show.

Pinning this on Tim Cook, OTOH, strikes me as simplistic. He has to juggle the two cultures somehow, and you might criticize that he's letting them coexist at all, but honestly, that ship sailed back in 2003, when Steve launched the iTunes Music Store. You don't make Jimmy's job** easier by dictating that he can't make shows about stuff the other divisions may have a starkly different opinion on. Just like you wouldn't want, say, Verizon dictating that its subsidiary HuffPo isn't allowed to write articles about telco infrastructure. And we sure wouldn't want the opposite either.

So leaving aside a rebranding or corporate restructuring where Apple Music becomes more Beats and less Apple again, I think we're gonna have to live with shows that portray a painful, wrong view of reality.

Here's what I'm curious about: are we implying that Apple's App Development Centers in Italy and India are equally terrible? Or, at all, more terrible than helpful? That doesn't seem true to me.

*) I.e., it doesn't apply to the hardware stuff — AirPods, recent Beats products, etc. seem fine.

**) Where'd Andre go? Did he just shy away from the publicity, or is he not interested, post-acquisition, in a further role?

Last edited by chucker : 2017-06-28 at 05:56.
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