The Apple iPod turns five today
John Naughton The little white box has come to define our social age Photo: AP A new iPod nano on display in a San Francisco store. TODAY, OCTOBER 23, is the fifth birthday of the Apple iPod, the iconic device that defines our era as distinctively as the Sony Walkman defined the 1980s. One sign of an iconic product is that an entire ecosystem of goods and services evolves around it. This happened with the Walkman, and it is happening now with the tiny Apple music player. You can buy all kinds of holders and `skins' to protect it from damage; mini-speakers that plug into it; microphones that turn it into a digital audio recorder; small radio transmitters that beam songs to the nearest FM radio; attachments that turn it into a breathalyser; underpants with special iPod-sized pockets and I kid you not a customised toilet-roll holder with a charging dock for your precious device while you are, um, otherwise engaged. (Only $99.95 from www.old-fashioned-values.com.) To mark the anniversary, Steve Jobs, Apple's mercurial CEO, gave an interview to Newsweek. He said two interesting things. The first came when he was asked why Apple had succeeded with a music player when many other more experienced consumer-electronics companies had failed. "We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes," replied Mr. Jobs. "We decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless." That's spot on. Before iTunes evolved, there had been lots of other CD-ripping MP3-management programmes, many of which were technically adequate but disastrous in terms of aesthetics and user-friendliness. The iTunes software was lovely to look at, slickly efficient in operation, and intuitively obvious in use. And the iPod hooked seamlessly to the programme. Suddenly, updating your mobile player became a doddle, rather than a demonstration of technical virtuosity. The thing just worked. Without iTunes, the iPod would have been just another gadget nice to look at and handle, maybe, but in the end just as useless as the average discarded PDA. As a system, iPod plus iTunes turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts. This echoes some advice given recently by Forrester Research, a consultancy, which advised companies to "sell experiences, not gadgets." This insight came from the discovery that most people who have been sold HDTV sets don't realise that to get the benefit of the new technology they also have to subscribe to a high-definition TV channel. Mr. Jobs spoke about how he persuaded the record companies to allow him to sell tracks on the iTunes store. He waged an 18-month campaign in which he pestered the companies while they experimented with their own disastrous download sites. "Remember," he continued, "it was initially just on the Mac, so one of the arguments that we used was: if we're completely wrong and you completely screw up the entire music market for Mac owners, the sandbox is small enough that you really won't damage the overall music industry very much." This must be one of the few cases in business history where having a small market share gave a decisive advantage. Meanwhile, the aforementioned music industry is heading back to the future. On October 30, it will launch a new distribution channel, the flash drive the gizmo you plug into your computer's USB port to transfer documents and presentations that you wish to carry around with you. Flash drives have been around forever, but apparently to the music industry they are the latest thing. The device, which will cost £3.99, allows rock music fans to transfer Keane's new single "Nothing In My Way" as well as other tracks, videos, and screensavers on to their computers or MP3 players. Hmmm... If the capacity of the drive is 128 MB or above, there might be a business in this. Customers can wipe the song and the marketing guff and still have a flash drive cheaper than they can buy one from Amazon. Karl Marx must have been thinking of technology stocks when he said that "history repeats itself ... the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce." Watching the bidding war for YouTube was what finally convinced me that we're now in TechBubble 2.0. The only assets that YouTube possesses are a) its subscribers, and b) the content they post on the site. Its subscribers can go elsewhere in cyberspace at the click of a mouse if they dislike what the new management does with the site; and as for the content, much of it consists of rip-offs or remixes of other people's intellectual property. So where is the value for Google? In an interview with Business Week the other day, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked much the same. Only a lunatic, he implied, would have paid $1.65billion. For once, I agree with him. Now, please show me to a darkened room. Happy Deepavali Shadab Husain Mo: 9335206224 To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
