people stop poopooing apples efforts... they will do an excellent job not meddling in their mess...
It's not bashing, not on my part, anyway. Part of it is how long you've used Apple's products. Me, since 1978. So I saw them as kings of a new industry, pushed off the throne, became the also-rans, then tried to innovate before their time but generated enough niche-market interest to stay afloat, then tried brought in Scully who ousted Jobs and in power struggle and tried to turn Apple into any commodity computer maker, except they made their own operating system, too, while still trying here and there to innovate -- so they split their mission at that point and it almost put them out of business. After some wallowing the muck, they bought Next Software, formerly NeXT Computer, one to get the NextStep operating system which provided an instant, outstanding platform upon which to build their next-generation operating system because their internal efforts were far delayed and floundering; and two, to bring Steve Jobs back in, who was widely considered to have difficulties managing the business end of things at Apple, had gone on to build Next, where again he there was trouble on the business end, but yet again he created some incredibly innovative products. Someone or several people on Apple's board determined that Jobs was after all the probably the visionary heralded back in the late 1970s and with the introduction of the amazing but somewhat power-starved Macintosh, decided they needed vision and leadership, and could hire people more suited to the task to keep the books, and that while the computer had chosen power and specifications -- specifications often meaningless to the end consumer -- over lots of innovation, it was possible people would respond favorably to a little more power and spec-obsession along with rekindled innovation.
At the time Jobs came back to Apple, they had their fingers in a lot of pies, really they were all just segments of the computer industry, but they made computers, PDAs, printers, digital cameras -- they were over-diversified. So Jobs slowly and then suddenly killed off all these distractions and focused on Macs. The first big digression was wireless networking, which was a key to Apple innovation when they included both the client and access point devices for these new way of networking computers. It fit and added value to the Apple experience. The next big turn in the road in products, because they also created their own exclusive retail presence, was the iPod. A lot of people, a lot of people here -- you know who you are -- maligned the iPod as the most ho-hum product Apple had created since the Scully years; it was called the first thing that will fail miserably since Jobs got the first iMac shipping. I have to give myself credit for some unusual prescience and note that I thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever made and I bought one the first day they came into the new retail stores. But I did do some reading about it beforehand and discovered that based on how Apple had designed it and integrated it with iTunes it was not indeed just another MP3 player.
All this has worked out well. The Apple brand is amazingly well known. The Apple TV is a digression of sorts, but it is a reasonable way to convince people it's safe to convert to digital media, because now not only can we take it with us, we can view on our nice TVs and listen on our quality A/V systems in our homes in places other than where our computers are. This is especially important with the popularity of laptops, as the last thing you want is your nice, light, portable MacBook wired seven ways to your home A/V system -- locked down more than any desktop computer not connect to a entertainment system.
Now we have the iPhone. It's cool, it's innovative, it's not just another smart-phone, but it comes closet to "just another" as anything Apple has made in a while. It's not only a new device with technology in it unfamiliar to Apple, but it also not only can use but depends upon service from a third party. That's unusual for Apple, as over the past few years they have more and more tried to make the Mac and the iPod require only the foundation of Apple services and products. You can use third-party solutions for these devices, but they only *require* Apple solutions.
So we have an iPod, an Apple TV, an iPhone, an iTunes Store to sell content for these devices -- all work the Mac but don't require the Mac -- and now we hear rumors of Apple founding, cooperating in or underwriting a record label (I don't think the music genre matters). It begins to look like Apple may be over-diversifying again, but this time branching out not just in different market segments, but entirely different markets. It begins to look like they want to become an all-device, all-media company. Sony is one such company and they're struggling with focus right now, and you have to remember they're a very different company with a very different history, a big part of that being that they originated in Japanese, where we know, say, Mitsubishi makes commercial and consumer vehicles, we may have been surprised to learn they make TVs too, but we're downright shocked to discover they made building materials, like cement, in another product group.
Here in the States, the best example of a formerly focused company trying to become an all-device, all-media company is Microsoft. And they've taken it on the chin a lot with that, and are really no farther towards achieving that goal than when set out on that path. Their Xbox 360 has sold fairly well, but they've missed their projected sales, they took a billion dollar loss to repair defective consoles, there are still complaints of innate defects in the console not addressed by the expanded repair program -- and all this on top of the fact the Xbox group, even excepting the billion dollar hit, has never made a penny; they've been losing money on this thing since the original Xbox model. Sony, an all-device, all-media company, made a ton of money on their games console business -- PlayStation and PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 remains to be seen. Nintendo has elected to just do games and they make money on their console business.
That's just an example of Microsoft trying to break into the games market, but they're trying to become a giant media conglomerate. It's not going that well. Really, with the same exception of some decent brand recognition with Xbox, they're still the Windows people.
If Apple wants to be an all-device, all-media company, and they pull it off, it could vault them into an entirely new realm of success as a business and innovator. It's no that if they succeed it would be a bad thing; it's that many of us longtime Apple customers sort of feel like we've been down this road before, at least a couple times, and when they finally hit the dead-end, the result was not good.