Things found and ideas about technology, business, music, culture and more — a blog of sorts by Shawn Yeager.
Strong, no-nonsense language from Penguin’s CEO John Makinson:
The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers.We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do.The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.Asked how he felt about Apple’s 30-percent cut:
This is better than the equivalent print agency model, in which publishers let retailers keep 50 percent.
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.
Paul Graham, “Apple’s Mistake”
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.
The Times Online asked “Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?”
Short answer: yes, unless you’re a record label.
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.
Why?
Seth Godin, The why imperative
Seth offers a great counter-balance to the cult of “core competency.” Focus is key, but don’t become blind to change.
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.
Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy
For whatever criticisms one might level at Microsoft, they rarely receive due credit for being as aware as they are of their own challenges.
