That all-important “one more thing” from Apple’s software presentation is part of the iCloud Web application and storage suite. It was a coup of sorts — and Apple’s win over competitors could be attributed to Jobs’ experience at Pixar Animation Studios, which he co-founded.
[…]
In that interview eight years ago, Jobs described the vast divide between technology and entertainment executives, and he talked about how he bridged it.

“One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other,” he said. “In Silicon Valley and at most technology companies, I swear that most people still think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting on a couch, drinking beer and thinking of jokes. No, they really do. That’s how television is made, they think; that’s how movies are made.”

Likewise, record executives can’t relate to technical people, Jobs said.
[…]
Because technology companies treat record labels like clearing houses for content, Silicon Valley bigwigs have trouble getting through the door, Jobs suggested. So it was perhaps Jobs’ expertise from Pixar, during his exodus period from Apple, that has given him the edge to secure risky deals with entertainment giants first.




  1. dusanmal says:

    Ok, enough of “fanboyism”: “It was a coup of sorts — and Apple’s win over competitors” … Apple haven’t offered anything notable over competitors who released their products first. Only advantage are potential lawsuits against competitors and that is where Apple is now. And I think music labels will stay out of those lawsuits exactly because of deal with Apple, neither do they want Apple alone in the marked peddling their wares nor do they have reasonable chance of win in Court if they allow Apple service to go on and not others who did it first.

    I would say exact opposite: lateness of iCloud is the sign of Apple losing it to competition who learned from early Apple success since iPod. iPhone held for long time, but lost quickly to Android once they sprouted. iPad will be losing to a tide of other tablets soon, probably defaulting to old Apple niche of 25% or less of the market. Finally, “the new thing” iCloud even didn’t came to market first and because of platform limitation will be of importance to existing Apple customers only. This is the very inflex point of Apple fall (not that they’ll fall completely but return to limited “fancy” market segment as a second fiddle).

  2. bobbo, libertarians are sooooo retarded says:

    I agree with Dusanmal–“Ok, enough of “fanboyism”: “It was a coup of sorts — and Apple’s win over competitors” … Apple haven’t offered anything notable over competitors who released their products first.” /// There is NOTHING in the link that explains how Jobs made the deal. Whatever trade secrets existed at the making of the deal are still safe==shrouded in the jibber jabber of a puff piece that offers no analysis.

    Not that I give a shit, but I have a question: it seems if you upload a song, that what you get played back is the copywrighted song in Apple’s data base as approved by the RCAA? How is the “match” made. What if I have a camcorder recording of Bob Dylan Blowing in the Wind? Do I get back any of the 50 recorded live performances, or do I get my own?

    PS–the cloud is for sheep.

  3. mikiev says:

    And they will continue to laugh to the bank – as a ‘second fiddle’ – because that has worked just fine for them, these last few years.

    They are embracing the idea of being a mobile-devices company, instead of a computer company… which can’t be signaled more clearly than by how they expect to deliver there next upgrade to OSX = broadband download only.

    What clearer way to shed the non-connected as customers than to make such an update only available online?

    Just go read any of the “fanboyism” forums to see what the non-connected think of this. 🙂

  4. mikiev says:

    Bobbo.

    I don’t think you “upload” any songs.

    Any songs you ever bought through iTunes are duplicated to your cloud account. No upload required.

    Any non-iTunes songs you have are compared to what iTunes is authorized to sell – and you are offered the chance to have the iTunes versions duplicated in your cloud account.

    You can probably upload non-iTunes songs to the “free” 5-GB storage they give to each account, but I don’t -think- any non-iTunes songs will be allowed in the $24/year program.

  5. Mr. Fusion says:

    About 15 years ago there were rumblings of creating a similar situation. Everyone would have the basic terminal in their house called a “toaster”. Apps and storage would be stored on massive servers.

    The idea failed then as most people wanted personal control over their work and storage. Storage is so cheap today I still don’t see people needing to store their digital data somewhere else. Other than sharing photos and videos why do we need “the cloud”?

  6. uteck says:

    and Apple’s win over competitors could be attributed to Jobs’ experience at Pixar Animation Studios, which he co-founded.

    He bought Pixar from Lucasfilm, he did not found it. He had very little to do with it’s running until Toy Story when he suddenly took interest and did not sell his stock as he was about to.

    Buy/Copy-Adapt-Take Credit
    It’s the Apple way.

  7. ROB WEST says:

    I read today Apple is being sued by a company named iCloud. Funny stuff, tag you’re it.

  8. bobbo, libertarians are sooooo retarded says:

    #4–mikiev==thank you, that makes “sense” from even a few more perspectives. So these “apple fanboi’s” really do submit to Apple Based Services so completely?……..Wow! Boy/boi is certainly correct but doesn’t go far enough. No human, much less just a man, should ever submit to a Corporation in such a manner.

    Whats wrong with these people?

    There are many $100 hardwares that will play your music on the web for you. Why limit yourself to Apple?

    This really doesn’t make any sense. Is it at least “free” after you have paid for it at ITunes? I don’t even care. I wouldn’t use the service if THEY PAID ME!!!

    Not all libertarians are soooooo retarded.

  9. Zybch says:

    Why the hell do people keep perpetuating the myth that Steve Jobs created/co-founded pixar?
    He bought the company from George Lucas when the guy needed some funds in 1986 to expand Lucasfilm plain and simple.
    The ONLY creative thing he ever does (and has ever done) is to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to other more talented people’s designs and ideas.
    Its probably the same fanboys (like Leo LaPorte) who keep spouting numbers like 17% when talking about apple’s PC market share which is still under 5% worldwide.
    Yes, some apple products are quite nice, but NONE of them are original and none of them are half as good as the slave fanboys keep preaching about, and this extra high walled garden of iCloud is NO DIFFERENT.

  10. The Pirate says:

    “One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other,” he said.

    Steve is a fucking Einstein of the obvious.

  11. McCullough says:

    I was wondering what Job’s One More Thing was going to be.

    Yawn.

  12. eggman9713 says:

    I can’t find where I first heard this, but part of Apple’s deal with the record companies is supposedly Apple pays for every song that a user matches on their account, even if the file the user has is pirated. This means that the record companies could actually get money from pirated music. Not the holy grail, but it’s getting there in the record companies’ eyes!

  13. Skeptic says:

    Wow. Such sour pussies, especially about a successful technology !!American!! company who employs over 12,000 American people. Land of opportunity…. or is that envy? Stupidity? You would be on DOS 12 if it weren’t for Apple. Who cares if Apple products are expensive? So are Ferraris, and they’re just another overpriced car? The Italians are always putting (the late) Enzo Ferrari down as a douche, right? How many times have you heard of the Ferrari fanbois? What would you think about that?

    And who cares if iCloud is dumb or might be a bust. Jobs is smarter than all of you and me put together. If anyone can make it work it would be him.

    Apple, PLEASE move to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and build that fantastic head office here.

  14. msbpodcast says:

    I find all of this tiresome.

    Apple is headed by Steve Jobs and, like every mortal being, he wants to leave something for his great grand-children, something permanent.

    The Apple doughnut (see bitches I’m not that much of a fanboy,) is going to last a few generations. Kewl as far as it goes. And that’s it.

    I suspect the the **AAs are all pissed off because technology, which gave rise to them after all, is moving on. (Ever notice how everybody wants to stop the clock right after they come up with a profitable idea?)

    I expect that some new **AA (The IDMA [International Digital Media Association]) will take a more wide ranging approach to the consolidated media.

    Its just that we have these antiquated national borders dividing things up and needing to be harmonized.

  15. jobs says:

    Other then the music service iCloud is not available yet. Let’s give it till the end of the year before we see what the impact is. Remember what a flop os x, ipod, iphone, itunes was supposed to be.

  16. Skeptic says:

    #18, if Jobs didn’t have the foresight to “plagiarize” or otherwise see the value in Xerox PARC, You would STILL be in DOS-12. LOL. Actually, you would probably be stuck in DOS-3… why innovate if you don’t have to?

  17. Mextli, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? says:

    It’s going to be interesting to see how this works out. This is the “deal” with the content providers.

    iTunes Match

    If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.2

    Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

    http://apple.com/icloud/features/

  18. Zybch says:

    #20 – Say what you want about DOS 3, but it was far more reliable and stable than ANY OS we have today.

  19. foobar says:

    The “pedro count” is high with iCloud. That means iCloud is likely to be a huge success.

  20. msbpodcast says:

    In # 22 pedro said: #16 You mean, the daughter he didn’t want to accept as his?

    Huh?!?

    He ever called the successor to the Apply III after her.

    What did you think the Lisa was named after?

    I don’t care that you’re an Apple hater, (Why should I?) but at least get your facts straight.

  21. msbpodcast says:

    The reason for using digital fingerprinting techniques for identifying the tunes is that Apple wil be able to identify and restore from their own collection all of the music that you have on you iPod or stored on some digital iTunes collection.

    Eventually, I predict that for some of us, guys with iPod Classics and still not enough room, this will turn into a streaming service where Apple will enable local storage of a variable part of your collection on your local device.

    I have a couple of 1GB iPods, a 15GB iPod, a 60GB iPod, a 160GB iPod and I have my music collection on a 320GB drive off of my MacBookPro. (With redundant device back ups and the whole mess archived onto DVDs.)

    My older iPods won’t be able to take advantage because they’re not WiFi connected but if they were…

    If I had an iPhone, and/or an iPad (soon, soon) I would be able to download any part of my music collection onto any wirelessly connected iPod Touch or iPhone or iPad which is registered to my account.

    Its not streaming as such but the ability to get what is mine from any device served up to me on demand.

  22. msbpodcast says:

    In #28 pedro said: two huge flops there, even copying Xerox: Apple III and Apple Lisa.

    Nobody’s saying otherwise.

    IBM has has plenty of turkeys, so has Coke, so has Pepsi, so has McDonald’s, so has Ford (remember the Edsel?) so has Studebaker so had GM so was …

    What’s your point?

  23. deowll says:

    I’m going to make a simple observation. Apple wants the high end high mark up share of the market. The low end low prophet per item share is available to anybody that wants it. Apple will not compete for that share of the market. This does not mean that Apple is having everything its way. It means it doesn’t care about some parts of the market and the magic number for Apple always has been 30% profit.

    If you live inside the Apple world then what Apple offered is a useful convenience. To anybody else what it offered doesn’t impress. I I have 218 GB of music and almost all of it was ripped from a CD (yes I do have a lot of boxes of CDs. I still have almost every CD I ever bought.) with only a few downloaded songs from Amazon. Nothing was from Itunes. What Apple is offering does not interest me at all.

  24. foobar says:

    #31 “Like Weiner…”

    Oh, now it’s a right wing obsession. Now it’s making a twisted sort of sense.

  25. Uncle Dave says:

    #30: I say otherwise, having worked with both.

    The Apple III was an excellent machine that I used as a programmer to develop software. I never encountered the chip problems that some runs of the machine had. That was a manufacturing issue, not functional issue.

    And as for the Lisa, it was really put on the market to test the concepts of a windowing environment outside of the PARC labs. Given the absurd price and assorted faults, I’m sure they never expected to sell many. Anyone who did was a guinea pig in designing for what was to become the Mac.

    What I always find humorous about Pedro’s apoplectic attacks on Apple is he is an ardent capitalist, knocking one of the best corporations in the world.

  26. foobar says:

    Yup, a daft conspiracy theory. I’m thinking the US harvested Bin Laden’s organs for Steve Jobs.

  27. Dallas says:

    Article is spot on. Jobs knew early on that “content is king” is the mantra for success and he set out a strategic plan to win. Pixar and now on the board of Disney. One smart progressive!

    Cloud based computing and storage is critical for succeeding in mobility. Play content anywhere, anytime on any device. The battle lines are forming with Amazon and even Walmart joining Microsoft, Google and Apple – all progressive thinking giants.

    The Teabaggers and Pukes still want to buy their Lawrence Welk shitty tunes on shrink wrapped CD’s. Store it in rotating floppies and drives.

    I’m very proud of Mr Jobs, Apple and some day just may by a Mac. Unlikely, but maybe just one.

  28. foobar says:

    Anyhoo, away from loon land and back to technology.

    There was a couple of shots of the inside of the data centre behind this thing. Besides the HP racks there were gobs of teradata data appliances. That’s a real different tack from Googles/Amazons of the world with their bigtable/nosql approach and Oracle’s/IBM offerings. Kind of fits when you think about it, especially with no share parallelism thing and analytics out of the box. It could the biggest concurrency problem that any RDBMS vendor has tackled.

    I also wonder about collisions in the document format when shared across devices (yes I know they also support key value pairs – that’s baked into Objective-C so they gotta). Document formats are finicky for diffing and resolution. Word, Pages and even Google Docs with a non-web client are notoriously flakey for version synching. I’m going to take a look at the API’s to see how they handle it.

  29. Dallas says:

    #38 you old smelly ass is still living in the 90’s where the ‘gadget’ is what you think people want to buy. Today, buyers (esp younger ones) are buy EXPERIENCES!!

    You’re so pathetically backwards and wish Dr. Kervorkian was here to treat you.

  30. Uncle Dave says:

    #38 Pedro said: “Because after the Apple III, mac became just a copy factory.”

    And Microsoft created Windows from scratch? There are very few new ideas that spring from nowhere. Most of engineering is building on what came before. Or at least that’s my engineering professors taught me that turned out to be right.

    And then Pedro said: “They did their business praying on ignorants that needed things easy; spoon-fed computer “users”.”

    I wonder if that’s because the majority of users aren’t engineers or programmers who like fiddling with computers and software. They just want a tool to get things done.

    I guess by your logic cars shouldn’t be so easy to use by ignorant drivers who can’t build their own.


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