layout: post title: Media Server = Consumer Electronics = Sony should buy Apple created: 1076442840 categories:

• Home Server
• Mac

Dana Blankenhorn points to a Parks Associates research report.

…most consumers think consumer electronics when considering a Media Server. And most of those who think of a consumer electronics company think of Sony.

…

There is a second, hidden message in this report, namely that a Sony buy-out of Apple does indeed make some sense. Apple has been better than anyone, even Microsoft, in marrying PC and CE technologies. Marrying them to Sony's content guarantees their future.

Playing the "so-and-so company should buy Apple" game is always fun. Right now, even Microsoft is using G5s to do development for it's next generation <acronym title="PowerPC">PPC</acronym>-based Xbox. Apple's recent moves around building iPods for HP and integrating iChat with AOL shows a serious bent towards services. Services is where the future is, as media servers, home servers, or whatever you want to call them are going to run to commodity, just like broadband routers have today. They'll run an embedded form of Linux or BSD, and the pressure points will be around standards: how to interface with other CE devices in the home, how to interface with web services, etc.