The Leaning Tower of Ping: How iTunes Could Be Apple's Undoing
Wade Roush wrote: — With each new product that Apple announces, including the revamped Apple TV and the new Ping social network, Steve Jobs reveals a little bit more of his plan to dominate the media universe.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wade Roush's argument lands two days after GigaOM made the opposite-sounding case that Ping is the future of social commerce — together framing the same September 2010 launch as both opportunity and exposure for Apple. The skepticism has a longer pedigree: back in 2007, Universal's dispute with Apple over iTunes showed how much leverage the labels hold over a store they supply, and Forbes spent that fall probing whether Apple's run had peaked.
What changed this week is scope. With Ping bolted onto iTunes and a revamped Apple TV unveiled alongside it, Jobs is no longer just running a store — he is extending a single, aging piece of infrastructure into social networking and living-room video, which is exactly why Roush can call the tower 'leaning.'
First-order effects
- Apple's label negotiations now carry higher stakes than in the Universal standoff of 2007: every renewal covers not just downloads but the social graph and storefront Ping depends on, giving suppliers more to withhold.
Second-order effects
- If Ping stalls inside iTunes, rival platforms and social networks gain an opening to own the music-social-commerce layer Apple just tried to claim, while the labels gain a second counterweight to iTunes pricing.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward media ecosystems where a dominant distributor's legacy infrastructure — a desktop-era store carrying social and video ambitions on top — becomes its main competitive liability rather than its moat.
The trend: Media distribution is shifting from standalone stores toward layered platform plays, where each new layer raises both the upside and the fragility of the original lock-in.