One of the music industry's smartest voices just ripped Apple Music for being like the old Microsoft
Charley Gallay/Getty and Kevork Djansezian/Getty
The latest person to add his voice to this chorus is Bob Lefsetz, who writes a popular music industry newsletter.
Like me, Lefsetz finds the new Apple Music app to be really frustrating when we try to play our existing music libraries. The new app eliminated a bunch of features that we used to take for granted, like the ability to play all music by a single artist in random order, and hid a bunch of other features under layers of menus.
But Lefsetz says this isn't just about Apple Music. He takes it as evidence that Apple under Tim Cook has forgotten the simple rules of innovation that Steve Jobs knew, and that Clayton Christensen wrote about in "The Innovator's Dilemma."
As he puts it:
When you encounter disruption, you save your enterprise by building a cheaper, less-profitable operation across the street. And eventually there comes a tipping point when the new enterprise subsumes the old. You don't mix them together. If you're trying to placate your old customers, you're screwing the new, and that's death.
Steve Jobs never did this....
Apple realized MP3s were dying. At least I hope they realized this. But they were fearful of not only cannibalizing said business, but alienating iTunes customers. Instead, Apple decided to hamstring both old and new listeners, which is important, because companies that do this fail.
You jump over the fence and join the revolution. You don't bring the old to the new. It's what hobbled Microsoft.
I'm not sure the implications are that dire.
But to me, it appears that Apple lacked confidence in the subscription service, so tried to make the app guide people to subscribing in every way possible - and if that meant compromising the experience for non-subscribers, too bad. They may get a lot of trial subscribers, but unless they fix the experience fast, they're going to lose them.
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