The Winners & Losers – 5 Year Outlook (Part 1 of 5)

Part 1 – iPhone Was the First Real “Smartphone” & Forever Changed Wireless Carrier Economics

Apple and Steve Jobs have played an indelible role in defining the Personal Computer, consumer adoption of electronic music/media and the mobile device industries. In each case, unprecedented levels of form, function and disruptive technological innovation have been successfully introduced, mass-adopted and subsequently pushed forward in a continual cycle of refinements that turn products and services into globally-know icons that develop a core of churn-resistant followers most companies could only dream about.

For every industry they have touched, Apple’s “secret sauce” has been:
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Wireless isn’t just about phones anymore and not even “mobile connectivity” quite does it justice. Smartphones represent a unique and amazingly compact blend of a phone, email aggregation point, computer, browser, portable GPS, TV, MP3 player, social network hub and thousands of other compelling functionalities that have demonstrated staggering adoption rates in addition to ushering in an entirely new meaning to “being connected”. They are everywhere and always turned on.

From a distance this would all appear to be good news for companies in the wireless business; however, a massive, unparalleled rush to embrace everything mobile is causing stress cracks, network overload, accelerated maturation of product lines and, in some cases, the pace will prove to be a terminal blow.

Companies that truly created much of the innovation in mobile devices, like Motorola, Palm and RIMM struggle to maintain relevance at any meaningful level. At the same time, smartphone proliferation has grown Apple’s market cap to 175% greater than Microsoft, with Google (more…)

A New York Judge ruled that cloud music services may store a single copy of a song and allow users to listen to that copy provided it can be confirmed they own the song on their hard drive.

On August 22, District Judge William H Pauley III issued a ruling that well could be the catalyst for “cloud music locker” services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive to scan a user’s collection and give them immediate access to a matching song instead of having to upload the track manually.

The precedent established in Capital Records, Inc. et al v. MP3 Tunes, LLC , when combined with increasingly sophisticated smartphones and the ultra-fast streaming capabilities of near-term 4G deployments may provide the framework for a multitude of competitors to Apple’s industry dominant iTunes service.

Music library sharing among multiple devices coupled with a common user interface platform has been at the core of Apple’s success. The inherently ubiquitous nature of cloud storage and Software-as-a-Service (more…)