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01/22/2005: "Apple's HD plans?"

Cringley has gone off the deep-end. Again.

Blue-Ray encodes 1080i (and its barely HD there) at 10-30Mbps onto a 27GB disc. Lets assume that Apple chooses to lock the encoder at 10Mbps for a 1080i image at "OK" quality. That means that most households with broadband will only be able to download at 20% of real-time speed, if they get 2Mbps out of their connection. Your two hour movie will saturate the modem for 10 hours in order for you to get a 2 hour movie.

Maybe Apple will downshift to 6.6Mbps for a 720p picture. More HDTVs can deal with this format. Here we're only spending approximately 3X real-time to download the clip. Of course, if its Pixar content, that will compress like a motherfucker. Maybe that will work.

Cringley is hardly original. Here is a story posted in early December by Jonathan Green.

Or here, here, or, if you want a real blow-by-blow review of Apple and H.264, check out this post at Drunken Blog.

I love the following bit from this Jobs interview with Business Week:

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it's easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there's a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That's a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't.

Q: Is this common in the industry?
A: Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) -- who's running Microsoft?

Q: Steve Ballmer.
A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well.

When you put a salespuke or "operations" idiot in-charge of a technology company, you get total, abject failure. Examples abound.

And, BTW, this piece, (also from drunkenbatman), was quite precient.

That's why they're so freaked out about what RealNetworks is doing, even though it'd sell iPods. At the end of the day it's not going to be about who is selling what end-play device, it's going to be about who is sitting in the middle. And Apple wants to be that benevolent dictator, parsing DRM-protected content to whatever device you're using at the time. It's also why the deal with Motorola is so significant; Apple can live without you buying an iPod, but if you're going to be buying DRM-protected content, Apple damn sure wants it to be through them.