I am starting to think that Apples primary motivation in buying Beats was to keep competitors from integrating it into their products. I'm not talking about the "tech" crowd, and most of the posters on this forum, but the everyday young kid or adult who would purchase a product strictly because they think having a beats speaker system creates a more premium product.
I know that this was already done before, with HP I believe, but perhaps Apple felt that moving forward if Beats were to continue to become a bigger and more popular brand it could threaten and take away sales from it's other products. Thus, while 3 billion was a ton of money, it's pennies to a company with over 100 billion in cash to spend, and if it hurts competitors ability to gain any sort of edge in the future it is money well spent.
The reason I say this is because I really can't see any way that Apple is able to actually incorporate Beats into other products. Their will be no Beats speakers in IPhones, MacBooks, or anything else.. The music streaming service, while interesting, does not strike me as any sort of game changer that would bring in significant revenue in the near future. It seems Apple is content with owning Beats in name only, and keeping the service and it's products relatively separate from the rest of Apple.
Seems like Apple wants to just continue to earn the profit coming from the suckers who buy the overrated and overpriced Beats headphones, get the software for the streaming service that I never see competing with the likes of spotify, and most importantly eliminating a potential distinguisher for its competitors that may have existed if all the stars aligned at some point in time in the future.
