Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [79]
—Steve Jobs
The iPod is the product that transformed Apple from a struggling PC company into an electronics powerhouse. How the iPod came together illustrates a lot of the points discussed in previous chapters: It was the product of small teams working closely together. It was born of Jobs’s innovation strategy, the digital hub. Its design was guided by an understanding of the customer experience—how to navigate a big library of digital tunes. It came together through Apple’s iterative design process, and some of the key ideas came from unlikely sources (the scroll wheel was suggested by an advertising executive, not a designer). Many of the key components were sourced from outside the company, but Apple combined them in a unique, innovative way. And it was designed in such secrecy that not even Jobs knew that Apple had already trademarked the iPod name.
But most of all, the iPod was truly a team effort. “We had a lot of brainstorming sessions,” explained one insider. “Products at Apple happen very organically. There [are] lots of meetings, with lots of people, lots of ideas. It’s a team approach.”1
Jobs’s Misstep: Customers Wanted Music, Not Video
As well as the Power Mac Cube, Jobs made another earlier mistake, with the iMac: he failed to include a CD burner. One of the primary features of the early iMac was its ability to connect to consumer camcorders via a FireWire port. FireWire is standard equipment on many consumer camcorders, and the iMac was one of the first consumer computers designed as a home-video-editing station.
Jobs had long been interested in video, and thought that the iMac had the potential to do for video what the first Mac had done for desktop publishing. The first piece of digital hub software Jobs created was iMovie, an easy-to-use video-editing application.
Trouble is, in the late 1990s, consumers were more interested in digital music than digital video. Jobs was so consumed by video, he didn’t notice the beginnings of the digital music revolution. Jobs has a reputation as a technology seer. Supposedly, he has the ability to divine future technology—the graphical user interface, the mouse, stylish MP3 players—but he totally missed the millions of music lovers who were trading tunes by the billions on Napster and other file-sharing networks. Users were ripping their CD collections and sharing tunes over the Internet. In 2000, music started migrating from the stereo to the computer. The rush to digital was especially marked in dorm rooms and, though college kids were a big source of iMac sales, Apple had no jukebox software for managing collections of digital music.
In January 2001, Apple announced a loss of $195 million, thanks to a general economic downturn and a sharp decline in sales. It was the first and only quarterly loss since Jobs had returned. Customers had stopped buying iMacs without CD burners. In a conference call with analysts, Jobs admitted that Apple had “missed the boat” by excluding recordable CD burners from the iMac line.2 He was chastened. “I felt like a dope,” Jobs said later. “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”3
Other PC makers hadn’t missed it, though. Hewlett-Packard, for one, was shipping CD burners with its computers, a major feature that Apple had to duplicate. To catch up, Apple licensed a popular music player called SoundJam MP from a small company and hired its hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months retooling SoundJam into iTunes (mostly making it simpler). Jobs introduced it at the Macworld Expo show in January 2001.
“Apple has done what Apple does best: make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” Jobs told the keynote crowd. “And we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”
While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs