Tham khảo tài liệu 'leander kahney's inside steve's brain_10', khoa học xã hội, kinh tế chính trị phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | the Net to synchronize calendar and contact information among multiple computers. None of this is unique to Apple of course but few companies have embraced the hardware software and services model so comprehensively or effectively. The Return of Vertical Integration Apple s competitors are starting to wise up to the virtues of vertical integration or a whole-systems approach. In August 2006 Nokia acquired Loudeye a music licensing company that built several white label music stores for other companies. Nokia bought Loudeye to kickstart its own iTunes service for its multimedia phones and handsets. In 2006 Real Networks teamed up with SanDisk the number-two player manufacturer in the United States behind Apple to pair their hardware and software offerings à la the iPod. Cutting out the middleman Microsoft s PlaysForSure the companies instead opted for Real s Helix digital rights management which promised tighter integration. Sony which has decades of hardware expertise but little or none in software has set up a software group in California to coordinate development across the giant s disparate product groups. The group is run by Tim Schaaf a former Apple executive who has been anointed Sony s software czar. Schaff has been charged with developing a consistent distinctive software platform for Sony s many products. He will also try to foster collaboration between disparate product groups each of which works in its own silo. At Sony there s historically been little cross pollination between isolated product groups and there s a lot of repeated effort but little interoperability. Sir Howard Stringer Sony s first non-Japanese CEO reorganized the company and empowered Schaaf s software development group to address these problems. There s no question that the iPod was a wakeup call for Sony Sir Howard told CBS s 60 Minutes. And the answer is that Steve Jobs is smarter at software than we are. Most significantly Microsoft abandoned its own PlaysForSure system in favor of
