Of Windfalls and History

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we're doing:

"Ironically the mistake the major labels made was the same one that IBM made when it gave the DOS franchise to Microsoft nearly 30 years ago. They were faced with a new market that they didn't understand. They had a piece of work that they couldn't do on their own or didn't want to do on their own and they didn't view it as critical or important, so they outsourced it to a partner. The partner turned that seemingly unimportant work into a way to accrue power and create a monopoly and control the industry. Today in the music business we're about where IBM and Microsoft were in 1989, when IBM finally got hit with the clue stick and realized what Microsoft was doing.

How will it play out this time? I don't know, honestly. But I like our chances."

Wow, fake Steve is getting a jump on historians by declaring the iTunes deal to have been a watershed, just like the DOS deal.

The technology business is all about trying to cut deals like that. Microsoft virtually exists to copy and/or buy new technologies that take advantage of new trends.

What's chilling is that Steve has "gotten religion" about "working with partners". It's not just about cutting deals any more, but about enlisting partners to see through his vision of a top-to-bottom value chain. Disney/Pixar, AT&T, Google, and maybe even Microsoft (beyond just Office).

Will any of Apple's existing and/or future deals land Apple a technological windfall like the iTunes or DOS deals? Maybe, maybe not.

I like their chances though.