Quote:
Originally Posted by brecklundin
If Jobs had a vested interest in ebooks then he would have followed the facts up with that "...but we are going to..." statement. He did not because he does not have anything to gain from doing so...
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Precisely.
You can be insulted by his dismissive statements about reading, but I have a different take.
Jobs is a CEO. His main and overriding job is to
maximize shareholder value. In that. he is very like former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. (Say what you will about Bill and M$'s business practices: he did
very well by his shareholders, and that was his job.)
The iPod is phenomenally successful, and has sold many millions. The iPhone is on its way to being very successful The iPod Touch is making promising moves out of the starting gate.
Would an iReader be that successful? I very much doubt it.
Just about everybody listens to music, and the iPod is a device that can be used
while doing other things. Music is a background, as well as a foreground activity. So the market for the iPod, and the iTunes service to feed it, is huge.
Everybody makes phone calls, and it's harder and harder to find people who
don't have a cell phone. And cell phones are as much fashion statements for a large segment of the market as they are tools. Apple has a deserved reputation for design, and the iPhone is a fashion statement with the best of them. Again, the potential market is huge.
How big is the potential market for a dedicated ebook reader? I'm willing to bet that the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle between them have sold in the tens of thousands. That's nowhere near enough to tempt Apple. I suspect
hundreds of thousands of sales would not be enough to tempt Apple.
As a CEO, Jobs has a fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders to invest Apple's corporate dollars where they will generate the highest return. That
won't be from ebook readers.
If you interpret Job's statement as meaning "The market for a dedicated ebook reader isn't big enough for us to profitably address", I think you'll be a lot closer to the mark. And from that point of view, he's right: the market
isn't big enough. Consider the discussion here about whether Sony and Amazon will do well enough to continue making and supporting the PRS-505 and Kindle.
We'll see, but meanwhile, railing at Jobs is a waste of time. You certainly won't change
his mind.
______
Dennis