BW: Where \"Think Different\" Is Taking Apple

BusinessWeek's Jane Black writes of Apple's bid to become a high-end consumer electronics company:

Morphing into a consumer-electronics company also capitalizes on a hip brand -- the cult of cool -- that Apple has spent billions building. Take the iTunes Music Store, which launched with much hoopla in April. Apple was the first player in that business to persuade the five major music labels to sign onto a pure à la carte download service, where music aficionados could buy individual tracks for 99 cents and burn them to a CD or transfer them to an MP3 player.

STREET CRED.  Until iTunes, customers' only legal option had been the more complex subscription services hawked by the label-backed services, Pressplay and MusicNet. On its first day, Apple sold a million downloads. By the end of July, it had sold about 7.5 million tracks.

The article is part of a special report section entitled Apple's Strategic Shift, good reading even if it's mostly rehashed marketshare versus mindshare stuff...

Where "Think Different" Is Taking Apple