Pull Those Engineers Off OS X 10.6 and Put Them on the Clock Radio …
Good thing Forrester Research (FORR) doesn’t run Apple (AAPL), because if it did the company would be well on its way to insolvency.
In an astonishingly unimaginative report called “The Future of Apple Inc.,” Forrester attempts to divine the products Apple will be peddling five years from now. “Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes,” Forrester explains. “To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.”
Sadly, the speculative product and services roadmap Forrester has devised seems more a roadmap to ruin than anything else, and a laughable one at that. Among the products the company sees Apple developing by 2013:
- A network-enabled “clock radio”
- An AppleSound universal music controller
- A digital picture frame
- A “Genius Bar” that makes house calls just like the Geek Squad.
Huh. So Apple, after reinventing the desktop UI, the digital media player, and the phone, will set its sights on the lowly clock radio and picture frame. Really? If Apple’s product dev team pitched Forrester’s clock radio idea to CEO Steve Jobs, he would probably hurl them one-by-one into rush-hour traffic from the roof of 1 Infinite Loop.
Comments
Apparently Forrester thinks that the future of Apple lies in them developing the iChumby in 5 years?
Posted by Joe Schmidt at May 22nd, 2008 at 3:43 pmThey forgot to mention FM transmitters in iPods so people can listen to five ads for every song they hear.
They also neglected to mention buying Adobe.
Posted by Eric Welch at May 23rd, 2008 at 8:11 amRoku has been making an internet-enabled clock radio for years. It’s really very cool. Connects through my wi-fi network, works great with iTunes and you can listen to stations from all over the world that stream their programming on the internet. I don’t think Roku has been too successful with it. I bought a second one at Fry’s on clearance. But Roku’s has just a two-line alphanumeric display. I’m sure Apple’s would have a more visually engaging UI. It’s not really such a bad idea for extending the iTunes brand. I love radio and podcasts. I’d buy one.
Posted by Joel Rosenblum at May 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm