John Gruber, on Daring Fireball, talking about the decline in camera sales:

Compare and contrast Sony’s approach to dealing with the decline in point-and-shoot camera sales with Apple’s approach to the decline in iPod sales. Apple is skating to where the puck is heading; Sony is skating to where the puck is at the moment.

He goes on to point out that he isn’t advocating Sony stop selling cameras. After all, Apple didn’t stop selling iPods. But it is a business in decline and the the future is clearly better cameras on phones.

This is a repeating theme in technology. A story of two companies, both coming of age at the same time. The first is a tech darling who defines the market for personal digital assistants and the second one who made pagers for a living. Both saw the coming age of smartphones and how that would decimate their existing businesses.

The first company (we’ll call it Palm) decided one random day that they would stop making and selling handhelds, laying off or reassigning everyone who worked on that business, throwing out a ton of knowledge and momentum in certain markets (like education). The second company (we’ll call it RIM) realized that it could marry its pager technology with cell phones and create addictive devices. RIM made the transition gradually; Palm did it abruptly. Palm died a horrible and ugly death while RIM, at least for a while, was the hottest smartphone company on the planet (until the market shifted on them again, this time from enterprise to consumer devices).

But at least both Palm and RIM realized the coming smartphone apocalypse would change their businesses and they’d need to adjust. Sony, Kodak, Canon and Nikon seem to have no answer to the transition at all.

In my on-going sequence of posts ridiculing Hollywood, we can add another chapter. Now you won’t even be able to add Warner Brothers movies to your Netflix queue until they have been released for purchase 28 days. Stupid.

For you movie executives who are paying attention, here is my process:

1. Hear or read about a movie (see trailer, read Friday entertainment section of the paper, friend tells me, etc.)
2. Add interesting movies to my Netflix queue
3. Occasionally go to the theatre to see one of Netflix queue movies
4. Wait for it to show up in my queue, make a buy/rent decision. If I saw it, I rate it and remove it.

My decision to buy your movie, rent your movie, even go to the theatre, is all predicated on my Netflix queue. It’s going to have to be really really really interesting for me to remember I want to go see it without it.

So, Warner Brothers, the odds of me ever seeing another one of your movies just approached zero.

The easiest guess is they won’t do anything. The company was very close to going bankrupt in 1997 and maybe it wants to horde cash to ensure its future safety. Somewhere on Apple’s campus there has got to be a Scrooge McDuck room, you know the one filled with cash that he’d swim through? Man, that’d be fun. (McDuck was hard-core though. He swam through coins. That’s gotta be rough on the skin.)

Or maybe Apple wants to give huge cash dividends to their stockholders… Ha! That’s funny.

The most likely guess is that it wants to control supply lines. Hard to compete when Apple buys up all the gorilla glass or flash memory. They’ve done this before.

Maybe Apple wants to buy out the US government. (It seems to be for sale anyway. Of course, it would probably be cheaper just to buy California.) There are laws, you say? Since when do those seem to matter? There are enough loopholes in campaign finance laws to drive a Mac truck through. Apple could find a way. With that it can move its factories back to the States by abolishing all labor laws, especially the minimum wage. Unemployment is high and housing is still expensive. Apple could start their own “Apple cities” where people would clamor to get jobs on the assembly line building iPhones and iPads in exchange for free, dormitory housing. It could be like the military but with fewer guns.

Or maybe Apple will buy Silicon Valley and spin it out into its own country. Then Apple could kick Google out and tell them to find a new home.

What if Apple bought a carrier? This has been speculated about before and frankly, I just don’t see it as Apple’s style. Maybe they’d buy all the cell towers in the world and then they could do what they want with them. Buying a carrier makes no sense (does any of this post?) since they are local and Apple sells devices worldwide.

How about Samsung? Man, would that piss off Google or what? I don’t know how the US Justice Department would feel about this one. Besides, they’d only buy them to shut it down. Oh, forget Samsung! Why not buy Google?

What if Apple bought a cable carrier? They’d own distribution rights but it might give Apple a content deal that would let them negotiate with the rest of the country. Instead of distributing through cable boxes Apple could stream channels as podcasts through iTunes. You’d just “subscribe” to whichever show you’d want to watch and it would be sitting in your account ready to watch. Maybe this is what Steve Jobs in biography said he’d figured out about Apple TV. He didn’t mean the technology to control it. He meant the content.

Education is a mess and Apple just announced a huge education initiative geared around text books. That’s, what, 65 million US customers alone. Maybe buying the entire text book industry for $20 billion and then giving away (or making really cheap) all of their content would pay off. Even if it didn’t pay off for Apple, it sure would pay off for the US.

Apple could buy Netflix. Ah, okay. Don’t know why they would. Apple never buys and keeps brands.

I’ve got one: what if Apple bought Disney. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Plus the symbolism would be awesome. Steve Jobs buys Pixar, Steve Jobs comes back to Apple, Disney buys Pixar (making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder), Apple buys Disney. Fun! Apple would be in a pretty powerful position, owning cable and regular channels as well as movies. We always talk about Apple controlling the next generation. What better way to do it then to own all the movies these kids love. And think of the deals. Suddenly every Disney and Pixar movie is $5 to own or $.99 to rent. ESPN would be available for $20 per year for anyone with an Apple TV. It might force the rest of the cable and movie business to match pricing or risk losing the rest of their subscribers. Hmm… This one might make too much sense for this article.

It’s impossible to know but it sure is fun to speculate!

Of all the great nuggets pulled off the web by MG Siegler yesterday regarding Apple’s earnings call, my favorite is this one:

Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year, notes Eric Spiegelman via Anthony De Rosa.

So… Apple tired of playing games with Hollywood? No problem. It can take a small portion of its almost $100 billion in cash and just buy it.

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Here’s the question that is going to screw Chris Dodd: who do you trust more, the tech industry or Hollywood?

Once upon a time, Americans spent all of our free time in movie theaters and in front of television, reading newspapers and paging through magazines. Once upon a time we believed in the folks who ran those businesses and starred on those screens. When Ed Sullivan said smoke Kent cigarettes and use Wisk laundry detergent, America did. When Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was bad, America agreed. We had faith in Cary Grant and James Stewart and John Wayne. We believed that the newspapers and magazines were telling us the news we needed to know, straight up.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, that faith began to falter and by the 1990s and into the new millennium, that faith was gone. When a starlet promoted a brand we asked how much is she getting paid? When the Times wrote a story we asked where’s the bias? We became cynical, we stopped believing what we were told, believing that the person or entity telling us had an agenda.

If time is an indicator, clearly the tech industry is trusted more. Now we don’t read papers, we read Twitter, we watch YouTube, we follow our friends on Facebook, and we search for opinions we care about on Google. Somewhere between 1970 and 2010, we stopped trusting old media and started trusted tech.

So jack-ass Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association, can say on Fox News that he’s going to take his bribe money and go home if the Congress he bought doesn’t get in line. But Chris Dodd doesn’t understand that the MPAA isn’t trusted enough anymore to make those claims.

What Chris Dodd doesn’t understand is that PIPA and SOPA just woke the lumbering giant, the tech industry he just tried to screw. And if that lumbering giant decided it will take center stage in guiding this country politically in the 21st Century, Chris Dodd and the rest of his old world media politicians better watch out.

Because America doesn’t trust you anymore.