Excellent Q&A with Steve Jobs in Newsweek: ‘Good for the Soul‘ on the cultural impact of the iPod the last years… Questioned if he’s worried since the anouncement of the iPod competitior, Microsoft’s Zune “…designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community,…” Steve answered:
In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear.
Something that every mobile developer and mobile startup should bear in mind before starting developing products: keep it simple and make things usable with only a couple of clicks, there’s easily the one click too much for the mobile user…
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One Response to iPod’s Cultural Impact
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It’s another failure of MS to really understand consumers – they basically PowerPointed all the “features” not on an ipod and looked around at the hottest trends (social networking) nad created the MS version – but the reality is that it’s a battery draining pointless feature. Sharing & social networks work when you give people a chance to look things over and opt-in without pressure – like viewing a page in MySpace or viewing a video in YouTube. The guy who uploaded the YouTube video has no idea you specifically viewed it unless YOU choose to log in and leave a comment but how effective would YouTube be if you had to request it from the guy an opportunity to view the video? That’s EXACTLY what the Zune promises – if you come up to me and ask me for a track, I’ll beam it to you OR, I know more about music so let me beam a track to you – get ready to receive. Show of hands – how popular will that be? In fact, itunes has a sharing feature (for local networks) like dorms and offices – who FREELY will post all their playlists for ALL viewing? … or do people prefer to trim a few “guilty pleasure” tracks here and there and load tracks to show how cool & hip you are versus the ABBA you normally listen to?
And it drains your battery – at a cost that’s the same as an ipod without any of the cachet. No video store yet and while the screen is larger, the resolution is the same (just bigger pixels – nice job MS) AND it’s not WMA plays4sure … so it’s WMA but not that WMA … based on a Toshiba unit that is not even in the top 5 of WMA players meaning it’s can’t even get a tiny sliver of a tiny sliver of the non-ipod market.
MS brilliant at selling to corporations but when it comes to consumers, they are the DMV of technology – would you buy a DAP from the DMV?