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Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

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Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#141

Post by zmmmmm »

blihp wrote: post #110
zmmmmm wrote: post #106

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing "services" for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can "service" them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts…

Take the marketing pitch with a grain of salt. They've been keeping track of aggregate usage data pretty much from the beginning. Also, they already have to keep track of things like which apps/music/movies you have bought for accounting purposes at the very least. For subscriptions they most likely also have to track consumption (i.e. per access data) for royalty/revenue share payments. I remember a story from the t…

> They just don't share this data outside of Apple

Google doesn't either. It doesn't stop them getting heat for it.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#142

Post by jedberg »

graeme wrote: post #140
necubi wrote: post #83

To me, the clear indication that they're serious about this transition to services will be making them available on third-party devices. Android has ~55% market share in the US, and >80% globally. Roku has 35% of the smart TV market (through both their dedicated devices and TV integrations), Apple has ~15%. A video streaming service that's only available on iOS and Apple TV will be inevitably niche, and no real compe…

I think the strategy is to make airplay 2 available on any smart tv or device that they can. Then, the streaming service will be available to anyone with any apple device: any iphone, ipad, mac. A large chunk of people have at least one idevice or mac in a household. For instance, many android users have ipads. All of these can get the service, and all will be able to put it on a screen with airplay 2. Don't know if…

I use my iPad to stream content for my mother in law to my TV using AirPlay. It's a huge pain in the ass. She can't do it for herself, I have to set it up because of the various steps involved. I don't see that as a viable workaround.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#143

Post by jedberg »

They're gonna need a huge internal cultural shift if this is going to work. Their entire company is built around hardware. Services are "just good enough". No one buys an iPhone because of the services offered -- you buy the services because you already have the iPhone and it works better than the third party services. But I don't know anyone who adores the Apple services.

Or to put it another way, even if they offered the Apple services on non-apple devices, I doubt many people who don't already have an Apple device would sign up.

Their services make money in spite of how they work, not because of it. If they want to compete on services, they actually have to make good services and prioritize them internally.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#144

Post by chipotle_coyote »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #130
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big—and new—step for Apple, and I'm sure it's connected to the video service. They don't want it to be "Apple product exclusive," even if I'm sure they'd rather you use Apple products to watch it. But Apple hasn't ever been quite as exclusive as they're painted to be when it comes to peripherals and services. They've had iTunes on Windows for a very long time (yes, it's kind of a trash fire, but it's still t…

I'd very much appreciate them making AirPlay an open protocol, enabling any app to freely stream to AirPlay 2 hardware. Are they really benefiting that much from the licensing deals vs the ecosystem it could spawn? They'd still be producing most of the AurPlay receiver hardware people'd buy, just not the transmitting end.

Yeah, I think it would benefit them to make it open, also. It's really hard for me to think of a protocol that benefits from being proprietary, especially if you're trying to build an ecosystem around it.

(I think there's probably a good case along those lines for an open "Internet of Things" protocol that would let any IoT device work with any voice assistant or other controller -- probably by "publishing" a set of control terms for it, like AppleScript dictionaries and whatever the ARexx equivalent was on the Amiga -- but so far I'm not sure anyone's even proposed that.)

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#145

Post by zerocrates »

GeekyBear wrote: post #112
zmmmmm wrote: post #106

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing "services" for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can "service" them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts…

Back when iAd was a thing, there were articles about how upset advertisers were that Apple's iAd wouldn't let them plug directly into an Apple customer's music and video store purchase history. >Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad. >rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeti…

I'm not extremely familiar with the ad industry, but isn't this setup (tell us who you want to target and we'll do it for you) the way that the other big platform holders work, like Google and Facebook? That's always been my impression, that the data is their "secret sauce" and they aren't interested in sharing.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#146

Post by shimms »

stringgames wrote: post #65
nradov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could even bundle in a MacBook, iPad, and watch at a higher price tier so that the hard core Apple fans could pay a single monthly subscription fee and always have the latest model of every device.

I wonder if a subscription fee for hardware would appeal to businesses.

If they have to buy a laptop anyway, spreading the cost over the life of the equipment turns a capital expense on the balance sheet into an operating expense on the P/L statement, and can have some pretty nice tax benefits (jurisdiction dependent of course).

Often plant and equipment is financed this way - photocopier for example are seldom purchased outright, and come bundled with service, support and consumables.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#147

Post by hug »

jedberg wrote: post #143

They're gonna need a huge internal cultural shift if this is going to work. Their entire company is built around hardware. Services are "just good enough". No one buys an iPhone because of the services offered -- you buy the services because you already have the iPhone and it works better than the third party services. But I don't know anyone who adores the Apple services. Or to put it another way, even if they offer…

On the other hand, if all of the services are “good enough” that they become the default option for every iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, that’s a very healthy user base from which to progress.

That said, Apple service excel in certain ways: Apple Music with Sound Check, for example, is easily the best sounding mobile music streaming. iCloud Drive is the most seamless internet storage account for mobile devices.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#148

Post by bsaul »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #79
bsaul wrote: post #71

Funny how an announcement looks different depending on the slope of your income. Apple reaching new markets vs apple « reinventing itself » is a complete different story. Apple makes great devices and can leverage that to conquer service subscription, but I don’t think anyone has been impressed by apple online services or technologies on their own merits...

>I don’t think anyone has been impressed by apple online services or technologies on their own merits... I disagree with that. iMessage is perhaps the best IM service out there. iCloud works seeessly across devices, in a way im not sure any other cloud storage solution does

iMessage is the only IM platform where i’m never sure if the person has actually received my message, if he’ll be able to respond to me, and where group conversation fork half the time into split conversations between members of the group.

All this because they tried to transparently merge phone number and icloud account as well as SMS and internet messages. Between people that may or may not be using iOS , icloud, or imessage ( or any combination of the above).

As for icloud, i suppose you’ve never ran out of space as a user, nor as a developer have you tried syncing a core data db or keychain custom data over that service. I’ve been developping on iOS since iOS 3 and i still can’t give you a good forecast on how syncing will work in practice.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#149

Post by FailMore »

I think Apple should have been bolder a long time ago. It should be the case that with Apple you get (near) global 4G/5G coverage on all their devices. So you take your laptop out in Spain and snap you’re online. Apples hardware is their bread and butter. I think they need to view it as their amazon prime... as in make a services ecosystem which means you want to stay using their hardware instead of just adding paid subscription services to their existing offering.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#150

Post by tootie »

jedberg wrote: post #143

They're gonna need a huge internal cultural shift if this is going to work. Their entire company is built around hardware. Services are "just good enough". No one buys an iPhone because of the services offered -- you buy the services because you already have the iPhone and it works better than the third party services. But I don't know anyone who adores the Apple services. Or to put it another way, even if they offer…

Do they have any iconic software that wasn't appropriated from NeXT? Keynote is pretty good. Everything else is either awful or basic.
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