Logitech is laying off employees and losing money. Here is a link about the layoffs: http://allthingsd.com/20120608/struggling-logitech-bites-bullet-lays-off-450/
It is not in a position to be pursuing niche markets. It is refocusing on the mainstream user with simple products that are easy to use and have widespread appeal. Its not going to be doing anything involving "servers". Most people don't know what a server is and don't care about them. The future is cloud services. The future is renting rather than owning. If you don't own anything, you don't need a local server. The original squeezebox was developed when there were no streaming audio resources, no cloud services. It filled a need when some consumers started ripping their own CD's to their computers and wanted an easy way to listen to them. The original squeezebox was just a step up in the evolution of music listening from the multi-carousel CD player. Now consumers don't buy CD's. Why should they? They can get any track, any artist, any genre, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for just $10. per month without the hassle of maintaining a server, or ripping CD's, or any of the other chores associated with collecting and maintaining your own music collection. And you'll never own even a fraction of the albums that the big boys have, e.g. Rhapsody, Spotify, etc. Look at the movie industry. DVD sales are down because it is easier to rent a movie on demand from your cable TV company, or though Amazon Video on Demand, or the several other movie rental services. Same thing has happened to the music industry. Why do you think Roku is so successful? Because it is open source, easy for a new company to put its "app" onto Roku and then stream to the public. And it is easy for the public to use a Roku. (A lot easier than Google TV) (And Roku, being open rather than a walled garden like Apple TV, offers much more choice). The public wants easy. If there is any future for Logitech to help deliver music, it will be on the Roku model, if at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mortslim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11039 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95603 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
