Apple buying Sony?

[John Rofrano]

[Joel Servetz] “Item in the news: Apple may be interested in buying Sony. Uh oh, might this be a problem for our Vegas?”

Hmmm… iVegas… finally an NLE worth buying a Mac for. lol. 😀

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff Schroeder]

At least it will never crash (hehe)

http://www.narrowroadmedia.com

[Dave Haynie]

Supposedly, this rumor began when Barron’s columnist Eric Savitz suggested that, flush with cash, Apple might think of buying Adobe, Sony, Disney, the continent of Australia, etc. But there was never even a hint of this from Apple or Sony.

Market-cap-wise, Apple is currently about 8x larger than Sony. But they’ve managed this based on essentially a handful of products: one or two current iPhone/iPod products (the “Touch” is always a proper subset of the iPhone… not much of a separate development), one iPad, one Apple TV, and a fairly small collection of Macs.

Oh, and software… Apple is essentially a software company selling expensive dongles that enable that software. They have complex software, including soup to nuts from OS to media content creation on the Mac platform. Macs, like every other PC, are nearly identical inside, and OEMed much the same way HP and Dell do it, only with nicer cases. iPods and iPads and iPhones are cute and fairly well made (albeit designed to slip from your fingers), but pretty austere… one port, and its proprietary.

And, the important point: Apple earns like a software company, too. They had an 27.6% operating margin in the year ending last June, and recently, $20 billion in sales for the last quarter.

Sony, on the other hand, had an operating margin of 2.7% over the last year, and they’re doing about $20-25 billion per quarter. And that’s over hundreds of products: cell phones, software, PCs, video cameras, still cameras, game consoles, TVs, DVD/Blu-Ray, etc. In short, Apple would double their sales, but barely affect their profits at all… and potentially drag them down for years to come, even if they did sell off many Sony business units.

Now Australia, on the other hand…

-Dave

[Bill Mash]

Maybe then Quicktime formats would work without resorting to Voodoo dolls and pins:-) Just installed 10.x and quicktime no longer works in 8.x — has the infamous black screen.

-Just because you can doesn’t mean you should-

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Mash] “Just installed 10.x and quicktime no longer works in 8.x — has the infamous black screen.”

You can’t have both. Quicktime broke all version of Vegas earlier than 9.0b.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Shawn Miller]

“Apple is essentially a software company selling expensive dongles”

Hmmm… it seems the other way around to me. Apple seems to be better at licensing or buying software then polishing it up for their hardware products. What was the last application actually developed (completely) by Apple? Seriously, does anyone know? I don’t. 🙂

Shawn

[John Rofrano]

[Jeff Schroeder] “At least it will never crash (hehe)”

That’s an interesting myth. I watch them crash all the time. Just invite a Mac owner to give a corporate presentation and after they’re done fiddling with their video adapters because no projectors support their output, and then stealing all the free electrical outlets because in true “i am the center of the universe” Apple style their huge white power adapters cover all the remaining plugs, you can watch their Mac crash as they try and get it to send video to the projector and it locks up. We waste more time in meetings every time someone with a Mac has to present than you can imaging. It never fails… they lock up all the time!

Me… I run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop and it never locks up. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

Do you think Apple’s really in the PC business anymore? I mean, sure, they sell more PCs than ever…. but they’re PCs. Apple’s ordering motherboards to their specifications from the Taiwanese, just like HP and Dell and all the others do, and putting into nice casework.

Even the iPad and the iPhone… they’re directing the design, but these designs are not complex, and most are large systems, outsourced. They’re using an SOC made by Samsung, some radio chips made elsewhere, etc. And even with all that, still making stupid decisions/mistakes on hardware, like the lack of diversity antennas (and making the antenna itself touchable) in the iPhone 4.

Again, they have a pretty strong physical design department, but if there’s any innovation in Apple’s hardware products other that, some other company did the heavy lifting. The ONLY reason these are popular is Apple’s UI, and the software integration with iTunes and the iTunes store; without that, the iPod would have been another also-ran MP3 player, and never evolved beyond that. They have NEVER matched the hardware features of comparable players… rather, they’ve counted on software lock-ins of various kinds to ensure that once an Apple user, always an Apple user. Smart, but unrelated to the hardware.

But their software… works. The only reason most people buy a Mac PC is to get the MacOS. I mean, sure, there are some people dual-booting MacOS and Windows, but I have NEVER heard of anyone buying an Apple PC and only running Windows. Anyone? And some people will buy Mac hardware just to get the apps… FCP, Logic, etc.

Sure, they bought NeXT to get the kernel used in the current MacOS, and they bought the foundation of FCP from Macromedia, and they bought eMagic outright. They bought both DVD Director (Astarte) and all of Spruce Technologies, to deliver DVD Studio. And also Color (orginally FinalTouch), when they bought Silicon Color. They built WebKit out of the KDE stuff, but it WAS such a day and night improvement that everyone started using it.

Native apps… hmmm. GarageBand, for one. Yeah, it was developed by the eMagic people, but some years after Apple bought the whole company — thus, it was made by Apple. And they had to see Acid first, to get the idea. Soundtrack/Soundtrack Pro… did that come out of eMagic too? I don’t think it was an indvidual purchase by Apple. I think Motion was an Apple original… even if it’s a

But these things happened ages ago. You can’t begin to argue that FCP, for example, has all that much to do today with the original from Macromedia. Apple’s successfully kept up against Adobe and Avid (are there any other major NLEs on the MacOS?), starting from nowhere. Ok, Premiere was pretty heinous before “Pro”, and Avid terribly overpriced — it’s not like they didn’t have an opening (in fact, much the same one Vegas used, also taking on the established players over the last 10 years or so).

They really do have the software chops. And while I’m not about to add all the details here, I’m probably the last person to defend Apple in any specific way… they hosed me royally back in the 90s.

But think about it .. as you’ve rightly pointed out, they have purchased a number of software companies. But that’s also salient — software companies, not just the apps, in most cases. They’ve also bought to small IC technology companies, though not much has come out of that (Samsung, who makes the A4, was already working with Intrinsity before Apple bought them) — and you have to buy a Mac to get to use that software. It’s a $3000 dongle.

-Dave