Now available here.

Thanks to Brian for the link.

Brent Schendler wrote a snooty piece in Fortune About Apple TV, which he doesn’t think much of. He explains further in his blog…

He wrote the column, he says,

to point out that even Apple can bungle a product from time to time. Another thing I probably should have said in the column was that in a broader sense, flubbing is actually a good thing, because it shows that Apple is genuinely trying to raise the state of the art of consumer electronics. As the old Silicon Valley saying goes: “If you don’t launch a dud now and then, it means you aren’t trying hard enough.” Finally, I also wanted to show how even Apple can sometimes make the same kinds of mistakes that Microsoft does.

Mainly, however, with the launch of the much ballyhooed iPhone looming in June, I thought it was important to point out how Apple TV demonstrates that Steve Jobs, the ultimate control freak, is not in total control of all the production values of his new consumer electronics products; at least not as much as has been the case in the past with his computers and the first few generations of the iPod and iTunes. That’s not his fault, but instead is because Apple, as it ventures further afield, no longer “builds the whole widget” to the extent that it has in the past. It must rely on capricious movie studios and TV networks and record companies for content of course, and it increasingly will depend on stubborn telecom carriers for cellular and broadband connectivity and for marketing help.

Steve Jobs loves music, and the much celebrated iPod clearly was not the product of someone with a tin ear. “Elegant” really is the appropriate adjective to use to describe it, because every little nuance seemed right. But Apple TV makes you wonder if Jobs paid any attention at all during the birthing process. Or maybe it betrays how his well-known disdain for broadcast television might have left him with a blind spot when it comes to TV-related products. Or perhaps this is just what happens to a company when it develops the makings of a high-tech monopoly that it wants to preserve and extend, in this case the market for digital downloads. Speaking as a long-time Apple fan, I sure hope not.

Randall Stross has a perceptive NYT piece about the difference between Apple’s retail stores and Sony’s:

Last Sunday, I set out to have a look for myself. I began at Sony’s flagship in San Francisco, at the Metreon Center, the shopping and entertainment complex. The mall was crowded, but Sony’s store, measuring an enormous 20,000 square feet, was all but deserted. The two uniformed members of the store security staff matched the number of customers I could see browsing the store’s wares.

Then I headed for the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, where I could see a Sony Style store compete almost directly across from an Apple retail store. The weather was gorgeous, drawing the usual weekend throng to the shopping center.

Sony’s mall store was long and large — 6,000 square feet — and filled with curvy panels and chirpy taglines like “My Style” on the walls and plush theater nooks. Here, too, the sales staff seemed to outnumber customers.

A group of five young salesmen and saleswomen who stood near the door when I entered were so engaged in a private, and apparently amusing, discussion that my imploring presence failed to draw anyone’s attention. The only other customers in the store were at the far other end, near the PlayStations. I suppose that the employees near me had become accustomed to busying themselves with their own entertainments.

A few yards away was the Apple store, which is one of Apple’s newer “mini” stores, introduced in 2004 and only about an eighth the size of Sony’s Stanford store. It was simplicity itself: a rectangular space with products lining the two sides, laptops placed on a small table, open space taking up most of the room, and, of course, the Genius Bar. The store was packed, yet the sales people were alert and attentive…

He’s right. There’s a Sony store in Cambridge (see above) and it generally seems pretty deserted. The photograph shows four staff and no customers. In contrast, I’ve never seen an Apple store that wasn’t packed. Among other things, there’s the fact that Apple provides what amounts to a free Internet cafe.

It’s strange to see the way the two companies have switched roles. Sony dominated the market for chic gadgets for decades (the Walkman, remember, was the iPod of its day). Now Sony has become, somehow, pathetic.

Wow! Interesting post by Blackfriars Marketing, a marketing consultancy run by Joe Butt and Carl Howe.

Today’s New York times ran [an] Apple ad … celebrating 100 million iPods sold. With that milestone achieved, I thought it might be interesting to analyze the last five years of iPod and iTunes growth.

In case anyone believes that selling 100 million iPods in five years is no big deal, here’s a bit of history. In 1945, there were 7,000 televisions in the US. By 1949, that number had grown to 1 million, and it hit 10 million just two years later in 1952. But it took more than 30 years for the number of televisions sold to exceed 100 million. Apple achieved that same 100 million mark with iPods in just five years.

Now those 100 million iPods are a big deal for Apple’s bottom line, but iTunes music has actually outstripped iPod growth. Blackfriars got involved in a little disagreement last year with an old Forrester colleague about iTunes sales. Based upon some of the data he had, he claimed that it appeared iTunes sales were slowing. I used the data I had to prove that he’d picked a particularly unfortunate sample to examine, namely the period between January and September, when fewer songs are purchased than in the big holiday season. But still, there was a lot of Web ink spilled discussing the point.

I think we can now lay that argument to rest once and for all. The folks over at Macsimum News picked up a little-noted quote from Steve Jobs saying that iTunes just passed the 2.5 billion song mark. Now for those of you keeping score at home, that means that iTunes is now selling a billion songs about every six months. But wait, there’s more! According to our figures, iPod sales passed the 100 million iPod mark in March, and TV shows passed the 50 million shows sold mark as well. Add onto that the 1.3 million feature length movies that have been sold to date, and well, I’d say you have quite a fast-growing business…

The author has made a logarithmic graph of various aspects of Apple media-related sales. (Remember that exponential growth shows up as a straight line on a log graph.)

The Blackfriars commentary continues:

Now if you ask me, the really interesting part about this graph is the fact that iPod sales appear to be continuing their exponential climb into the stratosphere. That’s important because it drives Apple’s earnings report, which we’ll hear more about later this month. But don’t ignore those TV shows or movies at the bottom. They’re on a very steep growth curve themselves — and there are a lot of new Apple TVs that are going to need feeding with content this year.

So what does the future hold for iPods and iTunes? While music is what made the iPod and will continue to be the major driving force behind Apple’s iPod thrust, Apple is trailblazing growth in digital movies and TV shows in a way similar to what it did in music in 2002. Remember Apple’s announcement that in the first week or so of movie sales, it sold 125,000 movies? Well, today’s Boston Globe reported the first month’s sales from Wal-mart’s online movie store were a whopping 3,000 movies. If we were to graph that on the log scale graph above, we’d need to add another decade of graph below where Apple numbers are just to see the Wal-mart sales. By all public measures available so far, iTunes is well on the way to repeating its domination of digital music in digital TV and movies. After all, once you’ve bested the largest American retailer, the sky is the limit.