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????《華爾街日報》（Wall Street Journal）本周一發表了一篇文章，說的是蘋果（Apple）對電視業務領域發起猛攻。文章字里行間似乎可以聽到媒體高管們絕望的哀嚎，他們祈求蘋果透露一點口風，告訴他們蘋果的電腦奇才們到底想干什么。 ????這些媒體高管中大概也包括魯珀特?默多克，《華爾街日報》即歸其新聞集團（News Corp）所有。美國現有的電視業務每年僅靠廣告和每月有線電視訂閱費就能獲得1,500億美元收入。據報道，這些高管們擔心這筆錢或將不保。 ????他們確實應該擔心。他們壟斷了有線定價，同時通過神憎鬼厭的廣告從觀眾身上牟利。如今，時機已經成熟，這個行業也該被互聯網技術瓦解了，就像十年前音樂業務被掏空一樣。這里有一個很好的例子：上周日晚，Showtime的2,000萬付費用戶收看了《國土》（Homeland）本季大結局，三個小時后，該劇的數字版本就出現在了BitTorrent上，供網友下載觀看。BitTorrent是一個點對點文件共享協議，全球數億觀眾通過該協議，電腦上觀看電視上最流行的節目，不用掏錢，而且不用看廣告。 ????難怪默多克這些大亨們無不渴望知道，喬布斯對其自傳作者所說的“終于搞定了”電視問題到底是指什么。喬布斯對電視產業究竟有何打算？會像他對音樂產業所做的那樣嗎？（先不論后果究竟是好是壞。） ????我們普遍認為蘋果正在致力于開發一款近乎完美的電視，不過《華爾街日報》周一的報道卻絲毫沒提到這點。實際上，該報道只是引用了一位接近媒體高管人士的言論，這位匿名人士指出蘋果正在討論的新服務“很可能完全依托于蘋果的現有技術，其中就包括蘋果的電視機頂盒。”（黑體著重強調部分是筆者添加的） ????一如既往，這讓我們想起賀拉斯?德迪歐對當前形勢的精辟分析。一周前，他在博客上發表了一篇文章，名為《隱藏在我們眼皮底下的秘密》（Hiding in plain sight）。德迪歐指出，幾乎所有蘋果最具顛覆性的產品，無不來自于對現有產品、技術或平臺的不斷改進。例如： ????? iPad是iPod touch的改進版 ????? iPod touch是對iPhone的改進 ????? iPhone使用了Mac平臺的OS X操作系統和Objective C編程語言 ????? OS X系統則源自NeXT ????? 蘋果應用程序商店的商業模型來自iTunes商店 ????? iTunes商店來自iTunes，后者最開始被用作Mac平臺的iPod同步工具 ????? 不一而足 ????再加上（史蒂夫?喬布斯本人去年提醒蘋果100名高級管理人員的）那個事實：制造電視機是一項利潤低、周轉慢的業務，德迪歐因此總結道，大家紛紛猜測的蘋果電視其實就是蘋果公司已經在銷售的蘋果電視機頂盒。用他的話說： ????“（蘋果電視）盛名之下，其實難符。巴不得避人耳目。它顯然沒能取得成功，因此反而得以在人們眼皮底下隱藏其秘密。” ????譯者：項航 |
????Reading between the lines of the Wall Street Journal's story Monday about Apple's "assault" on the TV business, you can almost hear the desperation of the media executives who asked Apple (AAPL) to brief them on exactly what the wizards of Cupertino are up to. ????These media executive -- which included, presumably, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. (NWS) owns the Journal -- are reported to be worried about what's going to happen to the $150 billion a year that the existing TV business generates in the U.S. alone from advertising and monthly cable TV subscriptions. ????They should be worried. That pipeline of cash -- extracted from viewers through monopoly cable pricing and intrusive ads that nobody wants to watch -- is ripe for disruption by the same technology that hollowed out the music business a decade earlier. Case in point: Three hours after the season finale of Homeland was piped to Showtime's 20 million paying customers Sunday night, digital copies of the show were available for downloading or streaming through BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol by which hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watch TV's most popular shows -- free and free of ads -- on their computers. ????No wonder the Murdochs of the world want to know what Steve Jobs had in mind when he told his biographer that he had "finally cracked" the TV problem. Could he have been preparing to do for the TV conglomerates what he did -- for good or ill -- to the music labels? ????Conventional wisdom has it that Apple is working on a full-blown TV set, but there's nothing in Monday's Journal story that actually says that. In fact, the story quotes one unnamed source familiar with the media executives' briefings who said that the types of new services Apple is discussing "could be done with Apple's existing technologies, which include its Apple TV set-top box." (emphasis ours) ????Which brings us, as it often does, to Horace Dediu's analysis of the situation. In a post published a week ago entitled "Hiding in plain sight," he pointed out that nearly all of Apple's most disruptive products have been sustaining improvements on existing products, technologies or platforms. For example: ????? The iPad is an evolution of the iPod touch ????? The iPod touch is an evolution of the iPhone ????? The iPhone uses OS X and Objective C from the Mac ????? OS X came from NeXT ????? The app store market model came out of the iTunes store ????? The iTunes store came from iTunes which came first to the Mac as a media sync tool for the iPod ????? etc. ????This, and the fact (as Steve Jobs himself reminded his 100 top staffers last year) that making TV sets is a low-margin, slow-turnover business, leads Dediu to conclude that the Apple TV that everybody is speculating about is the Apple TV the company is already selling. In his words: ????"A wonderfully asymmetric product begging to be ignored. A product that because of its apparent lack of success, effectively hides all its secrets in plain sight." |
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