iTunes Store launched in 2003, with 25 millions songs sold by year-end. By early 2006 the number was 1 billion. By mid-2008 the number was over 5 billion. 18 months later that number has now doubled. Astounding.
After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom — fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.
Another credible voice joins the chorus decrying the deeply broken approval process for the App Store. Squandering this kind of intangible asset — the hearts and minds of loyal developers — is a mistake it seems Apple would be far too smart to make. And so I have no doubt that they’re aware of the damage being done, but when leveled against disrupting the now $1.2B+ revenue stream that is the App Store, decision paralysis seems to have set in.
Simon and Schuster or the Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Google (organizing the world’s information) but they didn’t build a search engine because that’s not what they do. Struggling newspapers could have become thriving networks of long tail content, but they chose not to, because that’s not what they do.
One is a series of CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 lectures, this talk does a solid job of treating the issue of building partnerships to grow a business; worth watching.
For 10 years, music execs have waged a war against digital file sharing — and software like Napster and websites like The Pirate Bay — which have decimated the industry’s profits. But recently, there are signs from Europe that the battle over free music may be changing.
If you’re interested in how and why the music industry has come to be what it is, you’ll want to listen to this program from NPR’s On the Media. They’ve done a wonderful job making sense of a decade of fear, missteps, willful ignorance and even a few glimmers of hope.
What’s the old movie line from ‘Annie Hall’? Relationships are like sharks; they move forward, or they die,” says Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “Well, technology companies either move forward, too, or they die. They become less relevant.