Company: Apple
Product: iTunes Store
In the dusk of the 19th century Sony was only the big player of the music industry. Its innovative product “Walk-Man” changes the way that people used to listen the music. In other word Sony brings the music system from the room to the road. But after the invention of MP3 formats, the bulk and the electromechanical Sony player losses its grip in the market. Because of the size, memory and the fully digital forms, mp3 player totally obsolete the Sony’s product.
After then, lots of company started producing different types of portable mp3 player. But in the mid of this chaos a declining computer based company “Apple launched a music player in October 23, 2001 named as “iPod. Because of its aesthetic design, unique click-wheel to navigate, sexiest looks and plethora’s of other features, this device becomes so popular that company started to concentrate more on music industry rather than its core product “computers”. So, apple started to come up with improved version of iPod almost every year and currently apples have very sophisticated devices like iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad in its product line-up.
These products are just stylist hardware but the major success of apple products lies on the software they are embedding in their devices and the platform like iTunes from where consumer can frequently upgrade their gadget’s software and download millions of application, songs, videos, TV programs, books, movie and digitally almost everything.
In the beginning, lunching of iTunes was basically to convert the songs and videos of other formats into iTunes so that they will be compatible for apple products. But later apple recognized the potential of iTunes store as an online electronics shop and started to sell songs and video. The major intention of lunching iTunes was to protect piracy and to make gadgets compatible but now apple’s iTunes store is the biggest retailer platform of music industry. Beside songs, it is selling almost all movies, books, TV programs, newspaper and what’s not?
Consequently at this point of time apple have a control of everything and just by providing a platform apple is collecting billions of dollars annually. For apple itself iTunes store is almost out of the blue project as they have never dreamed of, i.e. going for retail. Because of the popularity of apples hardware and the economics of scale they are enjoying currently iTunes store is a great threat for the companies like Amazon, eBay, and to those who are selling their products on online platform.
By launching of iPhone like tablet computer called iPad recently, iTunes store even becomes so popular that all newspaper, publisher, recording houses and all the companies who have an online presence are trying to make a space in iTunes store. We can feel this rush as we can see that almost all companies are updating their iPad/iPhone/iPod applications just in every month.
Thus, in the current scenario, as computers are transforming into phones and tablets and the world is going online as never did before, platform like iTunes store has a huge potential as a online retail shop. Pravin Mishra