アップルの新しい音楽の大立て者 Jimmy Iovine［ジミー・アイオヴィーン］の経歴、はこれまでのシリコンバレーの大物たちと違ってプログラミングやコンピュータエンジニアリングの背景ではない。ニューヨーク市のレコードスタジオの床拭きやジョン・レノンのお茶汲みから始まっている。
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple’s new music impresario, Jimmy Iovine, didn’t start out writing code or studying computer engineering, the usual path of a Silicon Valley mogul. Instead, his career began sweeping floors at New York City recording studios and fetching tea for John Lennon.
But Apple is betting that Mr. Iovine’s four decades in the trenches of the recording industry, his knack for trend-spotting and his credibility with artists will help the company rejuvenate its music business nearly three years after the death of its co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.
今回の買収の中心は、Iovine 氏を雇って将来ビッグメディアとの交渉に当たらせるためだと Steven Milunovich［UBS アナリスト］はいう。それはかつてジョブズ氏が iTunes 音楽に果たした役割だ。
Steven Milunovich, a financial analyst for UBS, said he thought the bulk of the acquisition might have been spent on hiring Mr. Iovine to handle big media negotiations in the future, as Mr. Jobs did for iTunes music in the past.
“Jobs had a distortion field and that was kind of a unique capability,” Mr. Milunovich said. He added about Mr. Iovine: “Within the music world, this guy’s probably the closest thing you’re going to get to it.”
It is not a surprise to me that this $3 billion deal is all about Beats Music. Others seem to agree. The way I see it, Apple CEO Tim Cook is trying to replace some of Steve Jobs’ skills by bringing in the best in business. Angela Ahrendts has the chops to take Apple retail into a new territory. Jimmy Iovine will be running Apple’s content side of the house. Jony Ive is still a powerhouse in design. This is a good approach.
Some say, Apple paid about 2x revenues for Beats from its overseas stash of cash, so it isn’t that expensive a deal. It also allows them to extend into non-Apple markets. That said, despite all the hoopla, Apple’s music business doesn’t make them as much money. And the problems for Apple are elsewhere.
Apple’s Achilles heel is its inability to come to terms with a world where, data, cloud and services define the experience, not just great hardware. When it comes to the Internet and Internet-services, they are and will continue to be reactive. Culturally they don’t grok the importance of that problem, they don’t have anyone on the senior management team who is data-native to understand the problem, so they don’t know how to solve that problem.
So, they will continue to have a problem. Deals like Beats won’t be the last such deal. As a friend of mine once told me, that for most of us — time buys us money, for those who are rich, money buys time. Apple’s just buying time!
一瞬 Facebook に登場してすぐ消えたビデオ［冒頭］で Dr. Dre がこのウワサがホンモノであることをにおわせている。「The first billionaire in hip-hop, right here from the motherf**king West Coast.」（スゲエ、ウェストコーストから初めてのヒップホップビリオネアだ）と。
Anyway, has anyone noticed that the loud and visceral reaction to Apple’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Beats, the headphone and music service company, is kind of racist?
Clearly, some of the reactions may be racially-tinged, but the ones cited by Herrman seem dubious to me. Most of the head-scratching I’ve seen — including my own — is no different than if Apple were purportedly buying, say, Bose or Harman Kardon, for $3 billion.
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新しい領域
過去最大のアップルの買収は４億ドルの NeXT 買収で、1996 年まで遡る。（32 億ドルという金額がアップルが保有するキャッシュのたった 2% に過ぎないとしても、1996 年当時のアップルにとって４億ドルは大変な金額だった点は注目に値する。）アップルは必ずしも巨大買収に反対ではないと Tim Cook は言い続けてきたが、そんな買収は実際にはひとつもなかった。それにアップルにはサブブランド［sub-brand：下位ブランド、拡張ブランド］はない。アップルは巨大複合企業とは反対だ。人種的構成に関わらず、アップルにとって新しい領域なのだ。
Apple’s previous biggest acquisition was NeXT, all the way back in 1996, for $400 million. (It’s worth noting that $400 million was an enormous sum of money to Apple in 1996, and $3.2 billion represents just 2 percent of the company’s cash today, but still.) Tim Cook has long said Apple isn’t opposed to large acquisitions, but they’ve never made one. And Apple doesn’t have sub-brands. Apple is the opposite of a conglomerate. It’s new territory for Apple, regardless of any racial component.
If anything, as Micah Singleton argues at The Daily Dot, Beats’s brand stature among black Americans might help explain why this deal makes sense for Apple: 73 percent of black smartphone owners in the U.S. are on Android. Beats has brand appeal that Apple does not.
The other thing Beats has that Apple wants: its relationships in the entertainment industry. $3.2 billion? I still don’t know about that. But I’m no longer confused about what Beats has that Apple would want.
昨年の Iovine インタビューを見て、今回の買収は高すぎるヘッドホンやストリーミングではなく彼だと確信した。
Watched Iovine’s AllThingsD interview from last year. Now convinced it’s more about him than overpriced headphones and streaming music.
アップルが毎期生み出すキャッシュは 135 億ドル、週当たり 10.4 億ドルだ。３週間で Beats の買収費がでる。
Apple generates ~$13.5B cash per quarter; = ~$1.04B cash per week. Can pay for Beats with 3 weeks of generated cash.
もはやアップルは新しいマーケットに対応できないってこと？ Dr. Dre や Jimmy Iovine がアップルの上級幹部になるって？
A sign of Apple’s inability to create new markets? Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine to take senior positions at Apple?
もしフィナンシャル・タイムズがいうように Dre や Iovine がアップルに加わって音楽業界との手助けをするというのなら、Eddy Cue はどうなるんだよ？
If Dre & Iovine are joining Apple to help with music-industry relations, as FT and others have reported, where does that leave Eddy Cue?
アップルはカネを出してもいい！ 新しいマーケットに参入してもいい！ しかし人気ブランドのヘッドホンにだけは手を出すな！
Spend your money, Apple! Get into new markets, Apple! But whatever you do, don’t buy the most popular headphone brand, Apple!
アップルは Beats Audio からデザインの手助けを得られると書いたヤツがいる。お笑いだ。Beats のデザインは外部委託、しかも元アップルの連中だ。
Someone wrote that Apple will get design help from Beats Audio. LOL. Beats design is done by an outside agency, started by ex-Apple peeps.
興味深い事実：Beats のインダストリアルデザインを率いるのは Robert Brunner。Jony Ive の前任者だ。
Fun fact: Beats’ industrial design lead is Robert Brunner, Jony Ive’s predecessor as Director of Industrial Design at Apple.
「アップルの間違いは、チーズやクラッカーで満足している連中にキャビアを出すことが成長の手段だと今でも考えていることだ。」
“Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.”
CompUSA CEO「自分のためのリテール業を競争相手にしたら、居心地の悪いことになる。」CompUSA は 2007 年にヤメた。
CompUSA CEO: “When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that’s not a comfortable situation.” CompUSA shut down in 2007.
フェイスブックが非常に関心を持っていて、買収話の確認が取れれば Tyrese Gibson のビデオを自分たちのプラットフォームの力を示す例として使おうと虎視眈々としている。
Facebook will be keen for the Apple/Beats deal to be confirmed so they can use the Tyrese Gibson vid as an example of their platform’s power
自分が話をしたかぎり、アップルが買収しても Beats が業界を変えられると考えるインサイダーは誰もいない。
None of the music industry insiders I talked to believe the favor Beats has with the industry changes if Apple owns it.
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《Update 2》バツグンのマーケティングセンス（５月１１日）
［Beats By Dr. Dre Studio Color Campaign | YouTube］
We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.
Facebook was a bit slow to get aboard the mobile train. Unlike Apple and Google, they do not have a mobile OS. And they were slow to evolve the core Facebook experience from web to mobile. But once they got religion about it, they moved very quickly to do that and now have an excellent mobile experience on both iOS and Android. And with Instagram and WhatsApp, they have three of the top ten third party mobile apps globally (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). So they have gotten to a good place on mobile (and that’s what the $19bn WhatsApp buy was all about).
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Zuckerberg も Larry Page も
そして今や Zuckerberg と彼のチームは「次は何か？」と探し始めている。Larry Page と彼のチームがグーグルでやっていることと変わりないのだ。先週末 Video Of The Week で取り上げた Charlie Rose の Larry Page インタビューは、グーグルが次なる何か（バルーン、無人自動車、Nest、DeepMind など）を見つけるべく今やっていることのすべてを振り返ってみたものだ。
And now Zuck and his team are looking up and saying “what’s next?”. It’s not that different from what Larry Page and his team are doing at Google. The Charlie Rose interview with Larry that I made Video Of The Week last weekend was a bit of a review of all the things Google is doing to figure out what’s next (balloons, driverless cars, Nest, DeepMind, etc).
If you look at these big acquisitions like Nest and Oculus, you might scratch your head. What does a Apple-style proprietary closed thermostat have in common with Google’s mobile strategy? What does a Virtual Reality headset have to do with Facebook’s social graph? Nothing in both cases.
But the roadmap has been clear for the past seven years (maybe longer). The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. And they will pay real money (to you and me) for a call option on the next thing.
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はした金だ
次なるものがバーチャルリアリティなのか、あるいはモノのインターネット（the internet of things）、ドローン、機械学習、それとももっと別なものなのか明確には分からない。Larry Page も知らない。Mark Zuckerberg も知らない。私も知らない。しかしそれを見つけるレースは始まっている。何兆ドルという時価総額全体がかかっているのだ。だからそこかしこで投じられる数十億ドルなんてはした金だ。次なるものへのオプションを売ってそのはした金を得ようとする連中を除いては。まさに現ナマがかかっているのだ。
It isn’t clear if the next thing is virtual reality, the internet of things, drones, machine learning, or something else. Larry doesn’t know. Zuck doesn’t know. I don’t know. But the race is on to figure it out. Trillions of dollars of collective market capitalizations are on the line. So a couple billion here or there is chump change. Except for the people who collect that chump change for selling them an option on the next thing. It’s real money to us.
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ヤメられない
したがって（次なるものへの探索がいつまで続くのか私には見当もつかないが）ここ数年は「the next big thing」としてもっともらしいプラットフォームを築くというゲームをプレーすることになる。それはリスクの大きいゲームだ。しかしその見返りは非常に大きい。第１ラウンドはクラウドファンディング［crowdfunding：インターネット経由で群衆から資金を調達すること］で始めることもできる。だからこの業界はヤメられねえんだよ！。
So for the next few years (I have no idea how long this search for what’s next will go on), a game to be playing is building a platform that can plausibly be the next big thing. It’s a risky game. But the payoff can be large. And you can even start by crowdfunding your first round. Man I love this business.
Brian White［Topeka Capital Markets のアナリスト］によれば、Foxconn［注：正確には鴻海］がシャープへの資本参加を考える以前に、アップルが同社の買収を検討していたという。
But before Foxconn stepped in and invested in Sharp, Apple considered buying a stake in the company, according to analyst Brian White with Topeka Capital Markets.
今週中国での技術トレードショーに参加した White は、金曜日にこの情報を投資家向けノートで明らかにした。アップルは「当初 LCD マーケットに投資すべきかどうか検討した」が、最終的には投資しないことを決めたという。
White was relayed the information while attending a technology trade show in China this week, and he revealed it in a note issued to investors on Friday. He said Apple “originally debated” whether it should invest in the LCD market, but ultimately decided against it.
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シャープをおいて他に考えられない
もしアップルがサプライチェーンに投資して将来重要になる分野に影響力を行使したいと考えたのなら、そんな企業は他にはなかったというのが我々の意見だ」と White はいう。
“In our view, if Apple was willing to consider investing in the supply chain to exert influence in an area deemed important to the company’s future, we wonder what else the company might consider,” White said.
The news that Apple apparently considered investing in Sharp comes as the company announced on Friday that it has begun production of the world’s first LCD panels incorporating IGZO technology. IGZO displays will allow Sharp to produce thinner and more power efficient LCDs.
maclalala2 