Few people out there would say Steve Jobs isn’t a smart guy—excepting maybe Bill Gates, but then that’s more personal than professional. After all, the man brought the Avis (we try harder) of computers back and made it what Wall Street is now calling the most valuable technology company in the world. For Apple, under Jobs, it’s been all about i, not we: iPhone, iPad, hit the i-way Microsoft!
So I was a little more than surprised to hear this industry visionary taking such a limited view of the cable industry. His contention is not totally inaccurate. Motorola and Cisco historically have had the lion’s share of the set-top box market, and consumers have demonstrated an acceptance of cable’s set-top box business model, limiting the opportunities for additional boxes to find their way into home entertainment configurations.
Where I think Jobs is wrong is his ultimate conclusion, spoken at All Things Digital, that the cable box model “pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation.” “The only way that’s ever going to change is if you really go back to square one, tear up the set top box, redesign it from scratch with a consistent UI across all these different functions and get it to consumers in a way that they’re willing to pay for it. And right now there’s no way to do that,” Jobs said earlier this week.
Perhaps he’s not letting on to Apple’s real strategy—Jobs does have a penchant for pulling rabbits out of hats—but Steve Jobs the technology pioneer doesn’t seem to be thinking out of the box when it comes to conquering—or even playing with—cable television. This stance is even more surprising given Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala and plans to have a completely cloud-based streaming solution for iTunes.
There is a way to innovate the television experience and it doesn’t include a new set-top box, it includes using infrastructure that’s already in place—perhaps including a set-top box that’s already there—and the Internet cloud. All sorts of applications, opportunities and content can reside in that cloud. The trick is not to build a box to receive and contain it; the trick is to build a model that’s amorphous and floats above the box.
Tomorrow’s telecommunications space, including cable, will not be ruled by the device in the home, it will be ruled by the applications that feed the device in the home. That’s why people don’t want another set-top box; the ones they already have do much of what they want. It’s up to the innovators to take the set-tops the rest of the way.
I can understand Steve’s reluctance to pursue a completely cloud-based solution. After all, when it comes down to it, he’s a gadget guy. Love it or not, the iPad is a marvel of technological brilliance that has all other manufacturers scrapping their recent product plans, and going back to the drawing board. It’s not quite as sexy to say, “The device doesn’t really do anything. It’s all in the cloud.”
But first and foremost, Apple’s brand is about the experience, and they can use the cloud to deliver that experience to any device.
