[opendtv] Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 13:48:32 -0400
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200358
Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?
Apple's massive new $1 billion data center could become the hub for
an all-streaming broadcast network, says big-thinker Nick Carr.
By Bob Evans, InformationWeek
Nov. 8, 2010
Where others saw nothing beyond a pitched battle pitting peer-to-peer
networks selling stolen music versus generic but expensive CDs in
hermetically sealed cases, Steve Jobs saw iTunes.
Where others saw smartphones and notebooks converging into hybrid
devices that offered nothing new and often failed to match up to the
performance of either original product, Steve Jobs saw the iPad.
And now, where others regard the nascent generation of sprawling new
data centers as little more than highly automated powerhouses for
online operations, Steve Jobs could well be seeing a new broadcasting
network.
While others might call Apple's nearly complete $1-billion facility a
data center, Jobs might be calling it his all-digital,
all-customizable, all-streaming, and all-Apple broadcasting system
and network of the future.
That's the opinion of IT-industry big-thinker Nick Carr, who shared
some of his thoughts about what Jobs intends to achieve with the
sprawling facility in North Carolina during a recent email interview
with a website called cultofmac.com.
In an intriguing piece written by cultofmac.com's Leander Kahney,
Carr hypothesizes that Jobs and Apple intend to use the
500,000-square-foot facility to begin their transition away from a
customer-interaction model based on downloading to the more
sophisticated model of streaming.
From the cultofmac.com article:
"Apple increasingly views its mainstream computers, from iPod Touch
to iPhone to iPad to MacBook Air, as media players, with "media"
spanning not just audio and video but also apps," Carr wrote in an
email.
"From that perspective, the North Carolina data center can be seen as
essentially a broadcasting system that will enable Apple to make the
shift from a downloading model of media distribution to a streaming
model. It's a proprietary broadcasting system (not altogether unlike
traditional broadcasting systems), which means it's a very different
model of the cloud from the open model promoted by Google."
If that's the case, then Apple's new broadcasting-type business will
extend the company's zealous efforts to avoid the "open" approach, a
hard-line stand that Apple insists results in better experiences for
users because it gives Apple and its customers end-to-end control
over all aspects of that experience: hardware, software, user
interface, iTunes, and more.
That "more" is increasingly perceived by consumers and a growing
number of business users around the world as Apple's ability to
deliver superior products that, in turn, create fanatical customers
who don't view the Apple ecosystem as "closed" but rather as the best
approach for them to have the experiences they want.
The concepts of "open" and "closed" are inside-the-industry artifacts
that are losing their relevance in the wake of new approaches to
applications. If the App Store has tens or hundreds of thousands of
products available from tens of thousands of developers, just how
"closed" or "un-open" can that be?
And that's a core reason why Carr's theory about the forthcoming
Apple broadcasting system is so intriguing: The move to streaming
will certainly expand Apple's ability to continue to charm and dazzle
its customers with the latest and greatest media, applications, and
services, and it also positions Apple as perhaps the
most-sophisticated and powerful media company on the planet.
In that context, Apple's billion-dollar North Carolina data center
becomes the ultimate streaming-machine facility for iTunes,
seamlessly marrying that rich repository of music and video with
Apple's burgeoning roster of devices through which its customers view
their worlds.
In the cultofmac.com article, Carr describes Apple's multipronged approach:
"The success of the App Store demonstrates the continuing importance
of the local hard drive (or flash drive), with the cloud serving as
an extension of that drive rather than a replacement of it.
And I think Apple is more than happy to remain in that world for the
time being; indeed, one of its great competitive strengths is melding
diverse components-hardware, OS, applications, and now cloud-into a
unified and seamless user experience.
"Unlike Google, which has a strong economic and ideological desire to
move everything into the cloud as quickly as possible, Apple
understands that a hybrid environment plays to its strengths, so I
don't think it has much interest in pushing people into a pure cloud
model."
If Carr's idea about the Apple data center are on the mark, I think
we'll certainly see that hybrid model continue, but we'll also see a
marked acceleration in the use of broadcast system or network that he
describes because it eliminates a bit of friction in the
transactional system and it plays to the real-time, zero-latency
mindset that more and more consumers and even some businesses are
beginning to demand.
We won't have to wait long before finding out if this assessment is
close to Apple's actual intentions-the company hopes to have the
North Carolina facility online within the next couple of months (and
be sure to check out the great aerial photo of the massive building
within the cultofmac.com article).
Whatever Jobs' vision turns out to be for this facility formerly
known as the data center, one thing is certain: that vision will
radically redefine data-center strategy for some time to come.
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