Apple Inc (AAPL)

[KVW]

For a guy described as a "visionary", Jobs the businessman is locked into myopic tunnelvision over the next dollar at the expense of the future.

I think Steve is convinced that the lead Apple has in digital music is so immense, that Apple doesn't need to compete aggressively on price.

He believes, rightly or wrongly, that the market will gravitate to the best end user experience. He has said repeatedly that what Apple has done is "very hard" to do and that his competition don't have well thought out business plans.

I really think he thinks that there will be tons of competition jumping into this area as it inevitably grows (in 10 years, who is going to be buying their music on prepackaged CDs? The music will all be digital.) But, he thinks Apple will crush these newcomers because Apple has the resources to invest in the R&D needed to stay number 1 and these others don't.

So far, he seems to be correct, but Apple hasn't embraced the low end player market yet (mainly due to Steve's insistence on the end user experience where only multi-GB devices are acceptable to him) and Apple hasn't done much partnering (the AOL thing was the exception so far).

I really would like to see a partnering agreement with Amazon.com. Seems like it would be a natural. Click to buy a real CD (through Amazon) or click to buy the songs through iTMS.

And, I'd like to see mac.com users be able to stream any of the songs in the iTMS.

Time will tell if Apple blows it again. Obviously, Steve Jobs is playing it exactly like he did before, except he isn't going to make the mistake of bringing in an outsider to run the company again and lose control again. He will play it out to the end game.

Kevin