Apple iPad and publishing business: partnership or rivalry?
The iPad's phenomenal triumph did not come as a surprise - given Apple’s solid experience in creating stereotyped concepts (not just devices!), It was quite predictable. Recall that on the very first day of official sales, the company managed to sell 300,000 tablets, for an incomplete week this number reached 450,000, and already on April 30 Apple reported on the sold millionth iPad. IT Business week will try to analyze the impact of the iPad, not so much on the IT industry, as on the media market.
"... And sometimes the revolution just sucks"
(Linus Torvalds)
Of course, another success Apple could not leave competitors in a serene calm. Almost all the major manufacturers have somehow reacted to the winning debut of the iPad. Many vendors were quick to announce their own versions of tablets - it is significant that some companies preferred to express their opinion on the brainchild of Apple in very skeptical intonations, while others frankly admired the iPad.
')
ASUS CEO Jerry Shen (Jerry Shen) stressed that without Apple's participation, the tablet PC market would not have acquired such a scale that it is now. Note that at the exhibition Computex 2010 is expected the presentation of the tablet ASUS Eee Pad. Analysts suggest that the first version of the tablet will run on the desktop version of the Windows 7 operating system. DigiTimes notes that the device will appear in retail sales in Q3 2010, and by the end of the year, ASUS plans to sell about 300,000 tablets. In his speech at the quarterly investor conference, Jerry Shen drew the attention of the public that tablet PCs and netbooks occupy different market segments - if netbooks store information mainly on embedded drives, then tablets are, in fact, client devices for cloud computing.
Indirect sources indicate that the tablet is being developed in Nokia. Ashok Kumar (Ashok Kumar), an expert at investment bank Rodman & Renshaw, said the company plans to return to the tablet PC market.
Not far behind, and another mobile vendor - Motorola. Sanjay Jha, the head of the mobile division of the company, during the final conference Motorola announced that the company is extremely interested in the tablet market and is studying this market segment.
This summer there will be an interesting novelty from Dell - MID based on Google Android. It is reported that the 5-inch version of the device will appear in the summer, 7-inch - at the end of the year, and 10-inch - at the beginning of 2011.
However, the most significant event, according to IT Business week, is the statement by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who reported that the corporation is developing its own tablet PC. This device is likely to become the most serious competitor to the iPad and, at the same time, another engine of progress for the whole market segment. It is known that the development of Google will operate under the operating system Android. Apparently, the tablet will support Flash and have a full-featured version of the Google Chrome browser. Analysts believe that the emergence of its own tablet represents a significant risk for the company, since this step can ruin Google's relationship with vendor partners that have turned out to be competitors. It should be noted good market prospects for such development, given the enormous scale of the "ecosystem" of Google.
It is noteworthy that the ambitious projects of Microsoft in the market of tablet PCs, apparently, failed. First, the web has information about the termination of work on an exceptionally interesting project Courier (dual-display tablet). Following this, it became known that HP temporarily refused to bring the Slate tablet PC to the market, which had been announced with fanfare by Steve Ballmer even before the iPad. Recall that Slate was supposed to go on sale in the summer of 2010, we can only guess what caused the company to reconsider its decision. A number of experts argue that it is Microsoft’s position (or rather, the Windows 7 operating system, which is hardly suitable for tablet solutions) and caused a revision of the Slate release date. Perhaps the acquisition of Palm will allow HP to develop its own solution based on a very good webOS. According to the information of the Business Insider, the head of the HP personal devices department Todd Bradley (Todd Bradley) said that the Slate project was not eliminated, but only suspended until 2011. Note that on the day of the absorption of Palm, this same top manager openly announced the actual refusal Windows in HP tablets: “We see Palm’s innovative development as the ideal mobile platform for expanding HP’s presence in the mobile device sector and creating new products that are unique to HP.”
Thus, we can make sure that Apple’s success was the result of not only competent marketing and technical solutions, but also a horrendous inconsistency in the camp of competitors. The vendors were ready to confront Apple on the technical front, but the key success factor, the software, was shifted to Microsoft, which did not cope with its mission. It remains an open question whether this failure was not a tactical move by Microsoft, an attempt to narrow the tablet market, giving Apple the position of a forced monopolist.
Experts believe that in this combination, Apple beat Microsoft, enlisting the support of not only users, but also developers. Sharply raising the bar for the average price of iPad applications, the company managed to stir up a community of programmers who rushed to rewrite iPhone applications and create new ones that were originally targeted at the iPad. The result was not long in coming: according to Steve Jobs, over the first five days of sales, more than 3.5 million applications for the Apple iPad were purchased from the App Store online store.
Despite the flurry of criticism that Apple has suffered for refusing to support Flash on the iPad, Steve Jobs remained adamant. In the open letter “Reflections on Flash”, Jobs examines in detail all the flaws of Flash, which do not allow this technology to be present in Apple products. The critical shortcomings of Flash Jobs considers the deterioration of the compatibility and quality of software development due to the presence of an intermediate "layer" from a third manufacturer. Very controversial, but valid statement. But it’s hard to disagree with the second argument - Flash is being criticized by Apple for the “closeness” of this technology. Indeed, Adobe tightly controls everything related to Flash, from functionality to pricing. Jobs mentioned the dubious technical implementation of Flash, emphasizing that the technology is focused on a PC with a mouse, but not on mobile devices with Multi-Touch. However, all this did not prevent Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen from calling Jobs’s “smoke screen” claims. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the head of Adobe sarcastically answered Jobs in the style of “Whose cow would moo,” hinting at the numerous limitations that developers for iPhone and iPad face. Apparently, the situation with Flash support in the iPhone OS is not destined to be resolved in favor of Adobe - the company is not strong enough to dictate its conditions. For developers, this only means that Apple once again demonstrated clear boundaries that no one has the right to overstep. On the one hand, such a policy does not contribute to increasing the loyalty of the programmer community, on the other - it is Apple that provides this community with a profit incomparable with income from the “ecosystems” of other vendors.
About the coup that Apple has made in the publishing industry, today does not speak just lazy. Even at the time of the announcement of the functionality of the device, Japanese publishers predicted a serious crisis in the local market, estimated at $ 21 billion. Note that Japanese publishers fix retail prices - so the emergence of a cheaper alternative becomes a real threat to the whole industry. Experts at Nomura Holdings claim that the iPad is capable of turning the local publishing market — and if you recall that sales of e-books in Japan are four times higher than in the US, it becomes clear why the iPad was perceived in the land of the rising sun without enthusiasm.
Dotted “i” Jun Hasebe, an analyst at Daiwa Securities Group. According to him, “there is a big chance that devices such as iPads will allow authors to exclude publishers as intermediaries.”
At the same time, the US e-book market leaders, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, faced a reverse problem when, even with a flexible pricing policy, their activities were threatened by the iTunes Store and Apple’s unpredictable steps. According to reports that did not wish to introduce information sources, the three officials in the companies mentioned suggested that it was possible to transfer price control to publishers, that is, in fact, hand over competition to Apple.
A number of publishers, on the contrary, decided to extract the maximum benefit from the appearance of a new channel for content delivery. So the publisher Penguin recently held a presentation of children's literature, optimized for distribution through the iPad. Interactive elements have been added to many books, which look very impressive both in coloring pages for preschoolers and in physiology textbooks.
Zinio Corporation, one of the leaders in the field of digital publishing technology, has published interim results of using its iPad application - Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader. This free service has been included in the TOP-10 of the most popular iPad applications in the first two weeks since its appearance on the App Store. Note that among the publications available to users of this application, there were also Russian publications: “Cosmopolitan”, “Cosmo Shopping”, “Men's Health”, “Marie Claire”, “Harpers Bazaar”, “Psychologies” and others. Rich Magiotto ( Rich Maggiotto), President and Founder of Zinio comments: “The Zinio iPad app gives users instant access to the latest news stories from around the world on our shelves. Our platform allows publishers and advertisers to take full advantage of the innovative features and high resolution of the iPad. Users of the new device can now not just flip through the magazine, but feel it in a new capacity. ” Zinio’s Russian office shares the founder’s enthusiasm: “New digital technologies and reading devices allow publishers to become more inventive and realize new publishing opportunities, make magazines more dynamic in a literal sense,” emphasizes Ruslan Khromin, vice president of Zinio-Russia. “The iPad is a device that can turn the tide of the printing industry.” Note that the Zinio platform involves the use of one acquired magazine on different platforms - iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC.
The New York Times, one of the pioneers in the delivery of electronic content to the iPhone, drew attention to the promising market niche iPad. By the official start of sales, an application was released to access the electronic version of the publication with the functions of viewing videos directly in the text material. Martin Nisenholtz, Vice President of The New York Times Company, solemnly announced that on the iPad platform the newspaper looks “real”.
In general, the business model for traditional media that wants to go online is quite simple: the publisher should either sell their own application as a whole or charge for reading specific materials. The GQ log, for example, uses the classical scheme - for $ 2.99, the user gets access to the whole log. The Wall Street Journal prefers payment for specific articles that have interested the consumer. It will be possible to judge the effectiveness of both models only in a few months, or even in a year, when more relevant statistics will accumulate than the traditional boom observed after the start of sales.
Since we are talking about News Corp. (owner of The Wall Street Journal), then it will be appropriate to quote the head of the corporation Rupert Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch), who stated with pathos that the future of paper newspapers is predetermined. According to Murdoch, in 10-15 years paper newspapers will completely disappear, and in the next two to three years, readers will get full access to the press from mobile devices. In addition, Murdoch believes that free news resources are on the verge of extinction - and in the very near future, users will have to pay for access to news and analytics. In confirmation of his words, the head of News Corp. announced that during the year the sites of his publications (New York Post, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sun) will be paid.
The industry reacted skeptically to Murdoch’s statements. MediaPost author Eric Sass gave an example of the Amazon Kindle device, also designed to deliver digital content. For 2007-2008 about half a million devices were sold - out of this number of users, only 10,000 people subscribed to the digital version of The New York Times. Sass is convinced that the iPad will be a catalyst for development only for book publishers, but not for the media industry.
However, this does not prevent the leading publishing houses one by one to announce the appearance of the iPad version of their products. In a matter of weeks since the introduction of the iPad on sale, Conde Nast publishing house announced the “tablet” version of Wired magazine, as well as a number of popular glossy magazines - GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamor, The New Yorker, and others. Thomas Wallace, editorial the director of Conde Nast frankly admitted that the publisher today is merely studying the demand for iPad versions of its products - the market is being studied, the correct pricing policy is being determined and, of course, negotiations with advertisers are in progress.
Another potentially profitable segment of iPad content is educational literature. The Wall Street Journal reported in Mac that a number of eminent American textbook publishing houses (Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Kaplan Inc.) signed an agreement with Scroll Motion to create electronic versions of tutorials specifically for Apple iPad . Recall that Scroll Motion has quite a considerable expertise in developing such solutions - this is the company that created the Iceburg Reader for the iPhone. John Lema, executive director of Scroll Motion, is convinced that working together with textbook makers and, as a result, the global spread of electronic textbooks will open a new era in the education system.
"... And sometimes the revolution just sucks"
(Linus Torvalds)
Competition and lack thereof
Of course, another success Apple could not leave competitors in a serene calm. Almost all the major manufacturers have somehow reacted to the winning debut of the iPad. Many vendors were quick to announce their own versions of tablets - it is significant that some companies preferred to express their opinion on the brainchild of Apple in very skeptical intonations, while others frankly admired the iPad.
')
ASUS CEO Jerry Shen (Jerry Shen) stressed that without Apple's participation, the tablet PC market would not have acquired such a scale that it is now. Note that at the exhibition Computex 2010 is expected the presentation of the tablet ASUS Eee Pad. Analysts suggest that the first version of the tablet will run on the desktop version of the Windows 7 operating system. DigiTimes notes that the device will appear in retail sales in Q3 2010, and by the end of the year, ASUS plans to sell about 300,000 tablets. In his speech at the quarterly investor conference, Jerry Shen drew the attention of the public that tablet PCs and netbooks occupy different market segments - if netbooks store information mainly on embedded drives, then tablets are, in fact, client devices for cloud computing.
Indirect sources indicate that the tablet is being developed in Nokia. Ashok Kumar (Ashok Kumar), an expert at investment bank Rodman & Renshaw, said the company plans to return to the tablet PC market.
Not far behind, and another mobile vendor - Motorola. Sanjay Jha, the head of the mobile division of the company, during the final conference Motorola announced that the company is extremely interested in the tablet market and is studying this market segment.
This summer there will be an interesting novelty from Dell - MID based on Google Android. It is reported that the 5-inch version of the device will appear in the summer, 7-inch - at the end of the year, and 10-inch - at the beginning of 2011.
However, the most significant event, according to IT Business week, is the statement by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who reported that the corporation is developing its own tablet PC. This device is likely to become the most serious competitor to the iPad and, at the same time, another engine of progress for the whole market segment. It is known that the development of Google will operate under the operating system Android. Apparently, the tablet will support Flash and have a full-featured version of the Google Chrome browser. Analysts believe that the emergence of its own tablet represents a significant risk for the company, since this step can ruin Google's relationship with vendor partners that have turned out to be competitors. It should be noted good market prospects for such development, given the enormous scale of the "ecosystem" of Google.
It is noteworthy that the ambitious projects of Microsoft in the market of tablet PCs, apparently, failed. First, the web has information about the termination of work on an exceptionally interesting project Courier (dual-display tablet). Following this, it became known that HP temporarily refused to bring the Slate tablet PC to the market, which had been announced with fanfare by Steve Ballmer even before the iPad. Recall that Slate was supposed to go on sale in the summer of 2010, we can only guess what caused the company to reconsider its decision. A number of experts argue that it is Microsoft’s position (or rather, the Windows 7 operating system, which is hardly suitable for tablet solutions) and caused a revision of the Slate release date. Perhaps the acquisition of Palm will allow HP to develop its own solution based on a very good webOS. According to the information of the Business Insider, the head of the HP personal devices department Todd Bradley (Todd Bradley) said that the Slate project was not eliminated, but only suspended until 2011. Note that on the day of the absorption of Palm, this same top manager openly announced the actual refusal Windows in HP tablets: “We see Palm’s innovative development as the ideal mobile platform for expanding HP’s presence in the mobile device sector and creating new products that are unique to HP.”
Formula for success
Thus, we can make sure that Apple’s success was the result of not only competent marketing and technical solutions, but also a horrendous inconsistency in the camp of competitors. The vendors were ready to confront Apple on the technical front, but the key success factor, the software, was shifted to Microsoft, which did not cope with its mission. It remains an open question whether this failure was not a tactical move by Microsoft, an attempt to narrow the tablet market, giving Apple the position of a forced monopolist.
Experts believe that in this combination, Apple beat Microsoft, enlisting the support of not only users, but also developers. Sharply raising the bar for the average price of iPad applications, the company managed to stir up a community of programmers who rushed to rewrite iPhone applications and create new ones that were originally targeted at the iPad. The result was not long in coming: according to Steve Jobs, over the first five days of sales, more than 3.5 million applications for the Apple iPad were purchased from the App Store online store.
Not so scary flash
Despite the flurry of criticism that Apple has suffered for refusing to support Flash on the iPad, Steve Jobs remained adamant. In the open letter “Reflections on Flash”, Jobs examines in detail all the flaws of Flash, which do not allow this technology to be present in Apple products. The critical shortcomings of Flash Jobs considers the deterioration of the compatibility and quality of software development due to the presence of an intermediate "layer" from a third manufacturer. Very controversial, but valid statement. But it’s hard to disagree with the second argument - Flash is being criticized by Apple for the “closeness” of this technology. Indeed, Adobe tightly controls everything related to Flash, from functionality to pricing. Jobs mentioned the dubious technical implementation of Flash, emphasizing that the technology is focused on a PC with a mouse, but not on mobile devices with Multi-Touch. However, all this did not prevent Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen from calling Jobs’s “smoke screen” claims. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the head of Adobe sarcastically answered Jobs in the style of “Whose cow would moo,” hinting at the numerous limitations that developers for iPhone and iPad face. Apparently, the situation with Flash support in the iPhone OS is not destined to be resolved in favor of Adobe - the company is not strong enough to dictate its conditions. For developers, this only means that Apple once again demonstrated clear boundaries that no one has the right to overstep. On the one hand, such a policy does not contribute to increasing the loyalty of the programmer community, on the other - it is Apple that provides this community with a profit incomparable with income from the “ecosystems” of other vendors.
Apple and the publishing industry
About the coup that Apple has made in the publishing industry, today does not speak just lazy. Even at the time of the announcement of the functionality of the device, Japanese publishers predicted a serious crisis in the local market, estimated at $ 21 billion. Note that Japanese publishers fix retail prices - so the emergence of a cheaper alternative becomes a real threat to the whole industry. Experts at Nomura Holdings claim that the iPad is capable of turning the local publishing market — and if you recall that sales of e-books in Japan are four times higher than in the US, it becomes clear why the iPad was perceived in the land of the rising sun without enthusiasm.
Dotted “i” Jun Hasebe, an analyst at Daiwa Securities Group. According to him, “there is a big chance that devices such as iPads will allow authors to exclude publishers as intermediaries.”
At the same time, the US e-book market leaders, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, faced a reverse problem when, even with a flexible pricing policy, their activities were threatened by the iTunes Store and Apple’s unpredictable steps. According to reports that did not wish to introduce information sources, the three officials in the companies mentioned suggested that it was possible to transfer price control to publishers, that is, in fact, hand over competition to Apple.
A number of publishers, on the contrary, decided to extract the maximum benefit from the appearance of a new channel for content delivery. So the publisher Penguin recently held a presentation of children's literature, optimized for distribution through the iPad. Interactive elements have been added to many books, which look very impressive both in coloring pages for preschoolers and in physiology textbooks.
Zinio Corporation, one of the leaders in the field of digital publishing technology, has published interim results of using its iPad application - Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader. This free service has been included in the TOP-10 of the most popular iPad applications in the first two weeks since its appearance on the App Store. Note that among the publications available to users of this application, there were also Russian publications: “Cosmopolitan”, “Cosmo Shopping”, “Men's Health”, “Marie Claire”, “Harpers Bazaar”, “Psychologies” and others. Rich Magiotto ( Rich Maggiotto), President and Founder of Zinio comments: “The Zinio iPad app gives users instant access to the latest news stories from around the world on our shelves. Our platform allows publishers and advertisers to take full advantage of the innovative features and high resolution of the iPad. Users of the new device can now not just flip through the magazine, but feel it in a new capacity. ” Zinio’s Russian office shares the founder’s enthusiasm: “New digital technologies and reading devices allow publishers to become more inventive and realize new publishing opportunities, make magazines more dynamic in a literal sense,” emphasizes Ruslan Khromin, vice president of Zinio-Russia. “The iPad is a device that can turn the tide of the printing industry.” Note that the Zinio platform involves the use of one acquired magazine on different platforms - iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC.
The New York Times, one of the pioneers in the delivery of electronic content to the iPhone, drew attention to the promising market niche iPad. By the official start of sales, an application was released to access the electronic version of the publication with the functions of viewing videos directly in the text material. Martin Nisenholtz, Vice President of The New York Times Company, solemnly announced that on the iPad platform the newspaper looks “real”.
In general, the business model for traditional media that wants to go online is quite simple: the publisher should either sell their own application as a whole or charge for reading specific materials. The GQ log, for example, uses the classical scheme - for $ 2.99, the user gets access to the whole log. The Wall Street Journal prefers payment for specific articles that have interested the consumer. It will be possible to judge the effectiveness of both models only in a few months, or even in a year, when more relevant statistics will accumulate than the traditional boom observed after the start of sales.
Since we are talking about News Corp. (owner of The Wall Street Journal), then it will be appropriate to quote the head of the corporation Rupert Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch), who stated with pathos that the future of paper newspapers is predetermined. According to Murdoch, in 10-15 years paper newspapers will completely disappear, and in the next two to three years, readers will get full access to the press from mobile devices. In addition, Murdoch believes that free news resources are on the verge of extinction - and in the very near future, users will have to pay for access to news and analytics. In confirmation of his words, the head of News Corp. announced that during the year the sites of his publications (New York Post, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sun) will be paid.
The industry reacted skeptically to Murdoch’s statements. MediaPost author Eric Sass gave an example of the Amazon Kindle device, also designed to deliver digital content. For 2007-2008 about half a million devices were sold - out of this number of users, only 10,000 people subscribed to the digital version of The New York Times. Sass is convinced that the iPad will be a catalyst for development only for book publishers, but not for the media industry.
However, this does not prevent the leading publishing houses one by one to announce the appearance of the iPad version of their products. In a matter of weeks since the introduction of the iPad on sale, Conde Nast publishing house announced the “tablet” version of Wired magazine, as well as a number of popular glossy magazines - GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamor, The New Yorker, and others. Thomas Wallace, editorial the director of Conde Nast frankly admitted that the publisher today is merely studying the demand for iPad versions of its products - the market is being studied, the correct pricing policy is being determined and, of course, negotiations with advertisers are in progress.
Another potentially profitable segment of iPad content is educational literature. The Wall Street Journal reported in Mac that a number of eminent American textbook publishing houses (Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Kaplan Inc.) signed an agreement with Scroll Motion to create electronic versions of tutorials specifically for Apple iPad . Recall that Scroll Motion has quite a considerable expertise in developing such solutions - this is the company that created the Iceburg Reader for the iPhone. John Lema, executive director of Scroll Motion, is convinced that working together with textbook makers and, as a result, the global spread of electronic textbooks will open a new era in the education system.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/94027/
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