5 ms·

No mention of Eddie Cue? He was previously in charge of the store, right?

oddevan 11y ago
As far as I can remember, yeah.
georgespencer 11y ago
Yes. IMO: Optically, Cue has been peculiar in the last year. The night before the keynote introducing Apple Music, he was photographed at a basketball game. The keynote was a disaster: he was easily the least polished presenter; the segments didn't flow together; he stumbled a few times; he did awful dad dancing and cracked jokes which folks didn't laugh at; Drake (?) and Jimmy Iovine had clearly not told anyone what they were going to say. The product has not been a smash hit success, either. There was so much heat over how bad it was that some of Apple's best-known cheerleaders in the press and blogs were battering it for being unusable and buggy. This is a logical clipping of Cue's wings. Apple Music + Beats 1 are a significantly different challenge to iTunes which was buoyed by rapid expansion of a category (iPod -- which lest we forget forced Amazon to have a product page for "non-iPod MP3 players") and a low threshold to entry. Apple Music is a wartime product competing against Spotify's headstart. Schiller has for years been better at courting developers. He's more at ease scaling from macro perspectives on Apple's philosophy down to nerding out over software.
- eridius 11y ago
  Eddie Cue is doing a lot of things (including being responsible for iCloud and the Maps backend IIRC). And really his strength and the reason why he was instrumental to iTunes lay in his ability to negotiate and drive deals with all of the music industry players.
  - bonaldi 11y ago
    Deals which are visibly not getting made for the Apple TV service, by most accounts
    - donarb 11y ago
      Don't blame Cue, media companies are scared to death of making deals like Jobs made with the record labels.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    > And really his strength and the reason why he was instrumental to iTunes lay in his ability to negotiate and drive deals with all of the music industry players. He had negotiated some great deals back in the day, but the music world changed and he wasn't making progress at negotiating (partly due to his past success, labels didn't want Apple to continue to have so much power). Cue not being able to make a deal is why Apple bought Beats for $3B and gained access to its streaming deal. Tough spot to be in and I think it would have happened the same way regardless of who was negotiating (scrappy iPod era Apple and current iPhone behemoth Apple are radically different negotiating partners).
threeseed 11y ago
It could just be to relieve the pressure on Cue. Apple's reliance on the iCloud infrastructure is increasing with every new product they roll out. And there is the recent purchase of FoundationDB to manage and integrate as well as dealing with the increasing scalability and stability issues. It does make sense to have some focus there.

As far as I can remember, yeah.

Yes. IMO: Optically, Cue has been peculiar in the last year. The night before the keynote introducing Apple Music, he was photographed at a basketball game. The keynote was a disaster: he was easily the least polished presenter; the segments didn't flow together; he stumbled a few times; he did awful dad dancing and cracked jokes which folks didn't laugh at; Drake (?) and Jimmy Iovine had clearly not told anyone what they were going to say. The product has not been a smash hit success, either. There was so much heat over how bad it was that some of Apple's best-known cheerleaders in the press and blogs were battering it for being unusable and buggy. This is a logical clipping of Cue's wings. Apple Music + Beats 1 are a significantly different challenge to iTunes which was buoyed by rapid expansion of a category (iPod -- which lest we forget forced Amazon to have a product page for "non-iPod MP3 players") and a low threshold to entry. Apple Music is a wartime product competing against Spotify's headstart. Schiller has for years been better at courting developers. He's more at ease scaling from macro perspectives on Apple's philosophy down to nerding out over software.

eridius 11y ago
Eddie Cue is doing a lot of things (including being responsible for iCloud and the Maps backend IIRC). And really his strength and the reason why he was instrumental to iTunes lay in his ability to negotiate and drive deals with all of the music industry players.
- bonaldi 11y ago
  Deals which are visibly not getting made for the Apple TV service, by most accounts
  - donarb 11y ago
    Don't blame Cue, media companies are scared to death of making deals like Jobs made with the record labels.
- jonknee 11y ago
  > And really his strength and the reason why he was instrumental to iTunes lay in his ability to negotiate and drive deals with all of the music industry players. He had negotiated some great deals back in the day, but the music world changed and he wasn't making progress at negotiating (partly due to his past success, labels didn't want Apple to continue to have so much power). Cue not being able to make a deal is why Apple bought Beats for $3B and gained access to its streaming deal. Tough spot to be in and I think it would have happened the same way regardless of who was negotiating (scrappy iPod era Apple and current iPhone behemoth Apple are radically different negotiating partners).

threeseed 11y ago

It could just be to relieve the pressure on Cue. Apple's reliance on the iCloud infrastructure is increasing with every new product they roll out. And there is the recent purchase of FoundationDB to manage and integrate as well as dealing with the increasing scalability and stability issues. It does make sense to have some focus there.