Breaking news! Alleged Apple acquisition shows how doomed Apple is!
Gordon Kelly explains “Why Apple Has Lost The Plot With $3.2 Billion Purchase Of Beats By Dre” (no link but tip o’ the antlers to @JonyIveParody).
The plot that only clever people who write for the Forbes contributor network know!
… the Beats’ deal is absurd and suggests Apple’s executives have completely lost the plot.
Why is Tim Cook dressed as an astronaut?! This is an 18th-century period piece!
Here’s why.
[45 minutes of attempted shadow puppets]
Apple is paying $3.2 billion for a fashion statement.
BOOM. You cannot deny declarative statements, people. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re overblown and objectively false—they’re declarative!
Dre’s involvement grabbed the attention of millions who had never considered premium headphones and its red cables and distinctive logo have become iconic. But behind this there is virtually nothing of use to Apple.
Not even the Dr. Dremobile?
Kelly should follow the Macalope’s Twitter feed because last Friday was a cacophony of Apple analysts piling over each other like the zombies in World War Z trying to explain whether it was a) the hardware, b) the streaming music service or c) the talent.
But Kelly knows better.
Even if Apple did break form and keep Beats separate for its fashion benefits the image is jarring: Apple’s minimalism and obsession with white versus Beats’ love of bling and garish colours.
Cough—gold iPhone—cough.
The other theory that is being tossed around is the deal is about streaming. Apple wants Beats Music. If so this is also laughable. … Like every streaming music service to date it has struggled to gain a foothold in a Spotify dominated market.
And surely there’s nothing Apple could do to change that. Like have it be the default streaming app for all of its devices.
The numbers also don’t take into account the potential market share losses Beats could suffer from impassioned Google Android and Microsoft Windows users who may boycott the brand over its Apple ownership.
Assuming Apple is acquiring Beats, does anyone think for a minute that it’s doing so to maintain a cross-platform streaming service?
And yet there is an argument that Apple doesn’t care about the numbers. Like Facebook with its mind boggling $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, Apple is a company famously cash rich and it could merely be prepared to pay vastly over the odds for market share and brand credibility. But even then global instant messaging is an exponentially bigger market than headphones and streaming music combined …
Which may be why Facebook paid more than six times what Apple’s reportedly paying. Do you know how math works?
Kelly doesn’t mention Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine, who was a friend of Steve Jobs and is a talented and well-connected music industry executive. If Iovine takes over iTunes, it would be the second hire Tim Cook has made, after Angela Ahrendts, in building his own fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.
Is that worth $3 billion in addition to the hardware and streaming service and possibly some licenses and patents? You can’t tell if the plot’s any good until you’ve seen the whole movie.