> By all accounts Apple is just getting started with services ... so we can expect this to grow even more.
That's a very ... charitable way to put it. Another take would be that Apple, whose former CEO, over a decade ago, simultaneously oversaw Pixar and sat on the board of Disney, complete and totally missed the boat on streaming, original content, and cloud services. Think back to 2006: Netflix was a service that mailed DVDs, Amazon Prime was a year old, Dropbox was not around, Spotify was not around, Google was still focused on core services like maps and mail. Considering who their CEO was at the time, his connections, and their first mover advantage on digital entertainment and cloud, it absolutely amazes me that every single one of these companies was allowed to come in and eat Apple's lunch in some form or another.
The common explanation for this is that the content owners did not let them. Terrified of what iTunes did to the music business, they cut deals with not-Apple to prevent a monopoly from becoming more important than they were.
I don't know how to prove that, but it's a story that resonates. For a while I bought all my music exclusively from iTunes but now I subscribe to three different video services.
I think the issue was partially with the content owners (as mentioned in another reply to your comment) but mostly about internet speeds and processing power available at the time. Remember what YouTube videos looked like in 2006?
That's a very ... charitable way to put it. Another take would be that Apple, whose former CEO, over a decade ago, simultaneously oversaw Pixar and sat on the board of Disney, complete and totally missed the boat on streaming, original content, and cloud services. Think back to 2006: Netflix was a service that mailed DVDs, Amazon Prime was a year old, Dropbox was not around, Spotify was not around, Google was still focused on core services like maps and mail. Considering who their CEO was at the time, his connections, and their first mover advantage on digital entertainment and cloud, it absolutely amazes me that every single one of these companies was allowed to come in and eat Apple's lunch in some form or another.