The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Apple's iTV and the implications of what Steve said (O'Reilly Radar)

If I accept conventional wisdom, Apple is getting into the TV-making business because:

1. The living room is the last consumer segment that Apple has yet to completely remake in its image.
2. Apple creates new markets where none exist, and it isn't satisfied with merely improving upon existing ones.
3. Steve Jobs allegedly said that he'd cracked the code for creating an integrated TV set.
4. If the iPad is really "just" a big iPod Touch, and has already sold 55 million units, then a TV that is "just" a big iPad could do gonzo business.
5. The business of making TVs is broken, and Apple has to fix it.
6. Cable and satellite providers are evil, and Apple has to liberate consumers.
7. Tim Cook "needs" a hit.

As I stated in my last post following Apple's gaudy earnings numbers, I don't accept conventional wisdom because conventional wisdom is dead! Apple killed it.

Read the entire piece here.

UPDATE:

1. UK's ITV reportedly warns Apple not to brand their yet-unannounced smart television, 'iTV.' Meanwhile, Google updates YouTube for a better experience on Google TV.
2. MIT Technology Review cites my Apple iTV article in assessing Apple's TV plans.

Related:

1. The magic adapter: Apple TV and the battle for the living room
2. It’s Time to ‘Think Different’ because Conventional Wisdom is Dead: Thoughts on Apple’s Q1 Earnings Call
3. Apple's Segmentation Strategy (and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom) 
4. Apple, TV and the Smart, Connected Living Room

US Festival '83 Remembrances: Hell, Heaven and Hell Again -- in One Day!

US Festival '83: A generation earlier, the cliche was that if you can remember Woodstock, then you weren't there. I not only can remember US Festival, Day Two, but I was definitely there (with my brother, a good friend, and his girlfriend). 

Imagine, hell, heaven and hell again in the same day. The hell was 600K+ people showing up for a festival where parking is 6+ miles away from the fair grounds, and having to walk 6+ miles to the same fair grounds when like four buses show up. 

Heaven is seeing Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, Scorpions and Van Halen back to back to back in an orgiastic, positive-vibe filled mud pit (although, truthfully, Van Halen sucked, as David Lee Roth was too blotto to remember the lyrics in song after song).

You knew definitively that it was a life event.

Hell was desperately climbing through a bus window, and getting separated from our small group, so as to not have to walk miles back to the parking area, only to not be able to find our car or my brother for hours. 

This was pre-cell phone days, and the parking area was literally on a dried up lake bed, where our reference marker, a bathroom, got moved from its original point, and we had no reference point in a sea of thousands of cars and many tens of thousands of people.

I will never forget the moment when we actually found one another in that parking lot.

It was every bit as dramatic as the end-sequence in the 1963 animal classic, The Incredible Journey.

I guess that's why they say the journey is the reward.