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[/responsive]“If Apple were a newspaper or a magazine company within a decade it would no longer be a newspaper or magazine company.”
So states D. B. Hebbard in Talking New Media, citing the transformation of the company from a personal computer company to a consumer electronics company.
His point, we think, is that Apple would quickly abandon their core business of newspapers or magazines in favor of the latest technical development …the tablet perhaps?
We are normally big fans of Hebbard around here, but this one doesn’t fly. If Apple where a newspaper or magazine company, we believe we would see incredible innovations in printing technology and real multi-channel integration, both of which would take the printed newspaper and magazine into entirely new realms.
The underlying assumption with Hebbard’s pronouncement is that Apple was swayed by technology to move from personal PCs to “consumer electronics.” In reality, Apple was the driving force behind this global shift, turning those PCs into the smart devices we have now and certainly can’t imagine living without.
So the idea that they would abandon their print publishing ventures simply because someone else invented a new technology is a bit, well, un-Apple like.
Apple as a publishing company? I think we’d all like to see that. And maybe, just maybe, they could fix the whole digital magazine disaster.