Sunday, February 22, 2009

It's the Software, Stupid.

Apple made its name in music on the success of iTunes, not iPod.

I’ve worked in the technology industry for quite a few years.  And I’ve come to a pretty basic conclusion:  most hardware companies just don’t get software, and worse, they don’t GET that they don’t get software.  This posting gives just one example.

It is conventional (but somewhat flawed) wisdom in the computing industry that Apple gained its current momentum in Mac’s on the back of iPod’s success.  The often-told story goes like this:  Apple introduced the iPod into a relatively lazy mp3 market, and the iPod had such a gorgeous design and such great features that it eventually cornered the mp3 market, which served to reintroduce people to Apple products overall.  Hence, Mac’s share growth.

There are a bunch of problems with the above assertion.  But the main one is that the iPod’s design and features are what caused its share growth.  Not in my opinion.   

The simple truth is that iTunes is what caused the dominance of iPods, and iTunes was also one of the top-3 contributors to the share growth of Mac’s (what are the other top Mac growth factors, you ask?  That’s for another post…).  It was iTunes, not iPod.

The fact is, there were several cool-ish mp3’s on the market during the early days of iPod.  I owned one by Creative, and it was quite a good player.  Most of the mp3 offerings at that time (2003-ish) made it pretty simple to select songs by artist, album, song name, etc.  Most had fairly easy-to-understand hardware controls.  Some (but not most) even had decent industrial design.  But none of them had iTunes, which offered an elegant integration of hardware and software, and respected a few basic consumer insights.  (screenshot of iTunes 4 from freedownloadsplace.com).

Sometime around late October 2003 or early November 2003, in the first week after it was introduced to Windows, I downloaded iTunes onto my Windows PC.  Overnight, my music world was transformed.   Previously, I had been alternating between Windows Media Player, Napster, and other applications, and using them with various players.  Suddenly, I had a simpler solution for overall management of my music, an easier way to add to my library (iTunes store), and a great application for music synching and playback. 

Early versions of iTunes got a few really critical consumer insights right.  Making playlists very easy to compile, and then later find and play, was one of the big ones.  Afterall, playlists were one of the early “killer apps” of the digital music era.  Suddenly, I could mix-up my music in new ways.  Playlists were highly prominent in the user interface (see above photo of iTunes 4, the version in place during iTunes/iPod's rise to dominance).  Other applications supported playlists, of course.  Windows Media player has playlists, but in the early days, they just didn’t make playlists as easy, or as prominent in the UI.  Ripping CD’s was more intuitive with iTunes too.  And so was synching the portable device.  Before iTunes, I experienced a variety of synch fails, and had learned to overcome them by geeking my way through.  The iTunes software had a simple elegance that made buying, organizing, and playing music fun and interesting.  That’s the main reason Apple wound up on top in music, in my opinion.