Five Lessons For the iPod's Fifth Anniversary

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when man and woman roamed the planet without little white buds in their ears. That time would be the era prior to October 23rd, 2001--the day that Apple unveiled the iPod. Which means that the world's dominant digital audio player turns five years old on Monday.

In some ways, that original iPod was much like the original Mac in 1984: A latecomer to a relatively new industry that rethought everything and provided a user experience that was unquestionably a great big leap beyond anything else that other companies were doing. But the iPod has done something that the Mac never did: Achieve massive market share and hold onto it in the face of intense competition.

You could probably come up with twenty reasons why the iPod continues to be synonymous with the enjoyment of digital music. But in the spirit of its fifth birthday, here are five lessons its success has to teach us. They're all rather obvious, actually--but somehow, no other company has paid enough attention to them to come up with anything that out-iPods the iPod.

1. Simply put, entertainment needs to be simple. Apple is one of the few computer companies that almost never overcomplicates anything. That was never enough to make it the dominant force in the PC world, but it's been a huge advantage in consumer electronics, where people really do expect entertainment to be as simple as pushing a play button. The iPod comes far closer to meeting that ideal than any competitor, in part because it just doesn't all that many features. Which is why countless devices with more stuff at a lower price have failed to unseat it.

2. DRM should be damn near transparent. Apple came up with a reasonable set of rules for what you can do with iTunes music that lets you enjoy it in multiple ways and which rarely tells you "Sorry, you can't do that." And in my experience, at least, its FairPlay technology always does what it's supposed to. By contrast, I don't know how much time I've spent wrestling with the poke-in-the-eye-with-a-sharp stick that is Microsoft's digital rights management technology, as used in multiple services and devices that are shackled, rather than enabled, by Microsoft DRM; it's no surprise to see Real's Rhaspody begin to tiptoe away from the Redmondian technology.

3. The best revolutions are the ones that don't ask people to reinvent all their existing habits. When it came out, the iPod basically let you put your CD collection in your pocket; when the iTunes Music Store was added to the mix, you got the ability to buy your songs as digital downloads rather than on plastic discs. In other words, there's much about it that's comfortably familiar. I don't think it's a coincidence that subscription-based services like Napster, which are certainly a good deal in theory, have yet to truly catch on--they ask people to rethink how they acquire and possess music in a what that Apple doesn't. And it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft's Zune, which packs some interesting wireless sharing features, can succeed in getting folks to actually adopt them.

4. Small is reliably beautiful. The first iPod wasn't the original hard disk-based music player--Creative's Nomad Jukebox was pretty cool for its time--but it was the first one that comfortably fit into your pocket. And Apple has been smart to continually release iPods that are thinner and smaller than those before them. There's never been a time when even impressive players from other companies haven't tended to look chunky, and therefore clunky, compared to their Apple competition--and it's hard for any electronics device to come off as cooler than something that's similar but skinnier. Whether Apple can or will continue to shrink the iPod, I don't know, but I'm not aware of anything in the works that aims to out-svelte it, especially considering that the Zune isn't exactly wafer-thin...

5. Technological races are never, ever over. If, prior to the iPod, you'd asked me what company would dominate digital music, I might have guessed Creative or Rio. Or maybe Sony or Samsung. I might even have mentioned Microsoft. I wouldn't have mentioned Apple, though, and neither would have almost anyone else. (Here's a Macworld article from 2001 rounding up initial pundit response to the iPod; it was, at best, mixed. And if anyone had predicted that the thing would be not simply one of the most successful consumer electronics products of all time but a social phenomenon, he or she would probably have been drummed out of the National Pundit League for irrational exuberance.)

So I'm not even going to hazard a guess in this blog post about what the market will look like five years from now--except to say that a smart company with cool products could still enter the field today and do to the iPod what it did to everything that proceeded it.

Got a few more minutes for some iPod nostalgia? Here's Steve Jobs in 2001 announcing that Apple has decided to get into the digital music market, explaining why, and showing off its player...

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters