Former Lala CEO says Apple bought them 'for the people'

Lala's Bill Ngyuen had a short video interview with Fortune, and in it Nguyen says that Apple picked up his company specifically "for the people," not for the streaming cloud music service or any of Lala's other assets. Fortune confronts him on the idea of Apple running its own cloud music service (as has been rumored for a while), and Nguyen suggests that instead of building its own service, Apple's actually provided the hardware and software platforms to let any number of companies, from Pandora to Netflix, do what Lala did and provide content over the air to whatever devices people happen to use.

That's an interesting take for sure -- from Nguyen's perspective, it sounds like Apple is already doing what it wants to do with Lala, which is just use its employees' knowledge of how services like this work to provide help for other companies on the App Store. We've all expected Apple to run a streaming service of its own, but maybe it just wants to make things easier for other companies to jump in and provide content. Who knows what we'll see with that data center in North Carolina.