Jinn of Quality and Risk

Shiro Nakamura, chief of design for Nissan, plays classical music on a cello and jazz on a bass. He finds different ways to express himself in each genre: Jazz is innovation, creating advanced music; classical is more established ... It's the same in cars. How do you balance the two things? You must find the best path between the classicalness and the newness. 

Business Week: Jobs's maneuver will go down in history as the final straw that broke the back of the old music-distribution system -- and the industry's pyramid hierarchy that gives big stars big treatment and gives nearly everyone else squat. ... All along, Jobs has espoused an approach the makes buying music online easier rather than one that tries to make pirating it harder. 

How many CEOs in the computer world can speak like this? It's so great! I cannot overemphasize that ... you fall in love with music again ... and it's really wonderful. One CEO does, with good reason.

Steve Jobs, on being asked if he expects competition for the Apple Music Store: And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms — it's huge — and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox — how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy.