Aimless. Backwards. Confused. These are just a few adjectives which, to a frustrating extent, seem to perfectly encapsulate Apple’s glaring lack of vision in the TV space. Apple certainly understands that TV (and by extension, the living room) is important, but the more I see what Apple is doing with the Apple TV, and the more I hear Apple executives excitedly drone on about their comically boring TV strategy, the more I become convinced that the company has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.
Broadly speaking, I don’t believe that the higher-ups at Apple grasp, on an even basic level, what makes for a compelling TV viewing experience. And while the company, in my view, wasted its time exploring the feasibility of developing and manufacturing a car, it completely ignored the growing strategic importance of TV in the process.
This oversight — whether the cause be a lack of vision or a lack of execution — is particularly ironic given that it was Apple’s keen appreciation of the strategic importance of music in the early 2000s that led to the iPod, the iTunes Music Store and, in turn, Apple’s ascension back to the top of the tech heap. These days, however, power and leverage within the TV space is quickly being usurped by players like Netflix while Apple remains embarrassingly stuck on the sidelines.
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