Media Server = Consumer Electronics = Sony should buy Apple
Dana Blankenhorn points to a Parks Associates research report.
…most consumers think consumer electronics when considering a Media Server. And most of those who think of a consumer electronics company think of Sony.
…
There is a second, hidden message in this report, namely that a Sony buy-out of Apple does indeed make some sense. Apple has been better than anyone, even Microsoft, in marrying PC and CE technologies. Marrying them to Sony's content guarantees their future.
Playing the "so-and-so company should buy Apple" game is always fun. Right now, even Microsoft is using G5s to do development for it's next generation PPC-based Xbox. Apple's recent moves around building iPods for HP and integrating iChat with AOL shows a serious bent towards services. Services is where the future is, as media servers, home servers, or whatever you want to call them are going to run to commodity, just like broadband routers have today. They'll run an embedded form of Linux or BSD, and the pressure points will be around standards: how to interface with other CE devices in the home, how to interface with web services, etc.
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that's a rilly rilly tired old view...
it was summarized in my S0ny reports at uknowhere in 2000, from Businessw33k article I think. The truth in it is superficial but undeniable, J0bs envied the W4lkm4n and S0ny patterned aspects of VAlO marketing on aapl. But realistically, the VAlO business is bigger than aapl, the aapl PE is hard to swallow, and J0bs is psychically antithetical to ldei. I remind u that S0ny has long bn a big service provider in RoW: banking, insurance, isp, telecom; and is a major content provider all over, they are 160K+ people.
Lloyd is right
Lloyd hits it right on the nail - Sony is faceless and boring, Apple is erratic and exciting. That's why Sony would never buy Apple, because of an utter clash in the culture and probably perceiving Apple as some sort of untameable beast, particularly with Jobs at the helm. They also have to decide what to do with both PC divisions - would PowerPC hardware have any chance against Sony's PC division? Hell no. It would crash and burn, buried under "budget considerations" and swept under the rug just like so many other great things.