Apple goes where the portals failed — from wired.co.uk
Six months ago, an Apple analyst told me he thought the company’s long-term goal was to become the internet’s cable TV company. I didn’t get it then. I really get it now. Most think of Apple as a computer or consumer electronics company. I think that’s becoming a means to a much bigger end: becoming a giant news, entertainment and communications network with Googillian ambitions (emphasis from DSC –> and this will open up possibilities for education as well).
I’ll leave the goodness or badness of Apple’s ambitions to others. What is not debatable, however, is that what Apple is doing has the potential to be a colossally huge business.
Cable TV companies’ are always constrained by their capital costs (laying and maintaining all that cable). Apple has none of those worries. It appears that for the moment all it has to do is keep making killer devices and software, and the rest will take care of itself.
Devices like the iPad and iPhone generate audience, which attracts advertisers (a business Apple just said it was plunging into), which attracts content. It doesn’t hurt that Apple has been proven to be one of the few online platforms capable of charging for digital content.