Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [71]
Rubinstein said they eventually decided that giving Windows users a taste of Apple’s technology would have a “halo effect”—it would give a saintly glow to the rest of the company’s products. “In the end the halo effect was much more important than losing a few Mac sales,” Rubinstein said. “The iPod would get people to go into stores, and they’d check out the Mac at the same time.” Rubinstein said the combination of retail stores, the iPod, Macs, and iTunes on Windows was all part and parcel of the same strategy. “They feed off each other,” he said. “They use iTunes on Windows and say, ‘That’s what it’s like on the Mac.’”25
Jobs introduced the first Windows-compatible iPod in July 2002. The iPod was formatted for Windows but it still needed a FireWire connection, which was rare on Windows computers. The real change occurred nearly a year later, when Apple enhanced the way the iPod connects to a Windows computer. In May 2003, with the introduction of the third-generation iPod, Apple added USB 2 connectivity instead of just the standard FireWire. Adding USB 2 was a hugely important shift for Steve Jobs. It marked a departure from his principle of making products primarily for the Mac platform. But it also had the most dramatic impact on sales. Prior to the May 2003 switch, Apple had sold one million iPods. But within the next six months, it sold another million iPods, and nearly three million more were sold within a year. In the next eighteen months, nine million more were sold. The iPod is now firmly a Windows device. All iPods are formatted for Windows—not the Mac—out of the box. But whereas Windows computers aren’t compatible with Mac file formats, Macs are, and they have no trouble connecting to Windows-formatted iPods.
Likewise, other Apple devices are Windows-friendly. In 2007, Apple released its Safari browser for Windows: another attempt to create a halo effect around its software, especially as a lot of Windows users are using Safari on their iPhones. The iPhone works as well with Windows and Microsoft Outlook as it does with a Mac. AppleTV is Windows compatible, as are Apple’s Airport WiFi base stations. Apple’s old modus operandi of keeping its technology proprietary has been thrown out of the window. Jobs has fully embraced the world of Windows.
Sir Howard Stringer is trying hard to reinvigorate Sony, to bring back some of the vigorous inventiveness that built and defined the company, but the Japanese giant seems to have lost its flair for innovation. Digital music is the perfect example. This is a business Sony should have owned. Sony invented portable music with the Walkman and continued to dominate the portable device market even after dozens of other companies turned out Walkman and Discman knockoffs. But in trying to protect its music labels, Sony crippled its initial digital players. Amazingly, Sony’s early digital Walkman couldn’t play MP3 files, even though that was the emerging standard for digital music. Instead, Sony forced users to convert their music to Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format, which understandably they were loathe to do. They already had reams of music in MP3 format on their computers, which couldn’t be played on Sony’s players. The iPod, by contrast, had no trouble playing MP3s.
Jobs’s willingness to try open-ended experiments and then refine the ideas isn’t seen at many other companies. At Sony, for example, managers often show up to meetings with a single screenshot and say, “This is our design.” One engineer, who’s worked closely with the Japanese company for several years, said he saw this many times. Puzzled and slightly shocked, he’d ask how they arrived at that particular design: What were the choices they made? Why did they do it this way instead of that? But his questions would always be rebuffed with a curt “This is the approved design.”
“They think they are really innovative, but they’re scared to do anything new,” the engineer explained. “A huge part of it is getting the blame. They’re so terrified of making a mistake,