ubermore notes by Mike Williams

Revered for sleek and snazzy products, the company and its man-in-black patriarch made a string of dubious choices about what features to include. And what to leave out. Apple TV comes with a hard drive and a link to the TV set, same as TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) (now in 4.3 million homes). Yet Jobs decided against offering the ability to record shows. Worse, Jobs chose to shut out millions of Web downloads on YouTube and elsewhere and confined Apple TV to handling only the content you could get through Apple’s own iTunes. This parochial and proprietary approach, in an increasingly open, Internet-infused world, had relegated the company’s Macintosh line to a narrow slice of sales. Yet it also had let the iPod dominate online music, which may be why Jobs believed he could pull off the same thing in video. Wrong.

- paidContent.org - The Economics of Content - How Did Apple Get iTV So Wrong?