Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [84]
Chieco was puzzled when I told him that Apple had already registered the iPod name. He wasn’t aware of it, and neither, apparently, was Steve Jobs. Chieco said the Internet kiosk must be a coincidence. He suggested that maybe another team at Apple had registered the name for a different project, but because of the company’s penchant for secrecy, no one was aware that it was already one of their trademarks.
On October 23, 2001, about five weeks after the events of 9/11, Jobs introduced the finished product at a special event at Apple’s HQ. “This is a major, major breakthrough,” Jobs told the assembled reporters.
And so it was. The original iPod looks primitive now: a big white cigarette box with a blocky black-and-white screen. But every six months Apple improved, updated, and expanded the device, which culminated in a family of different models, from the bare-bones Shuffle to the luxurious iPhone.
The result: more than 100 million sold by April 2007, which accounts for just under half of Apple’s ballooning revenues. Apple is on track to sell more than 300 million iPods by the close of 2009. Some analysts think the iPod could sell 500 million units before the market is saturated. All of which would make the iPod a contender for the biggest consumer electronics hit of all time. The current record holder, Sony’s Walkman, sold 350 million units during its fifteen-year reign in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the iPod’s success is the total control Jobs exercised over the device: hardware, software, and online music store. The total control is key to the iPod’s function, ease of use, and reliability. And it will be critical to Apple’s future in the exploding digital entertainment era, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
Lessons from Steve
• If you miss the boat, work hard to catch up. Jobs initially failed to see the digital music revolution but soon caught up.
• Seek out opportunities. Apple wasn’t in the gadgets business, but Jobs was curious to see if there were openings.
• Look for “vectors going in time”—bigger changes in the wider world that can be used to your advantage. The iPod greatly benefited from improvements in batteries and screens driven by the cell phone industry.
• Set a deadline. Jobs wanted the iPod in stores by the fall. That was only six months to bring it to market. Punishing but necessary.
• Don’t worry where the ideas come from. Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s marketing, suggested the iPod’s scroll wheel. Other companies wouldn’t even have marketing staff in a product development meeting.
• Don’t worry where the tech comes from—it ’s the combination that matters. The iPod is more than a sum of its parts.
• Leverage your expertise. Never start from scratch—Apple’s power-supply team fixed the battery, while programmers created the interface. Six months to market would have been impossible if Apple had reinvented the wheel.
• Trust your process. The iPod wasn’t a sudden flash of genius or a breakthrough idea. It emerged from Apple’s tried-and-true iterative design process.
• Don’t be afraid of trial and error. Like Jonathan Ive’s endless prototypes, the iPod’s breakthrough interface was discovered through a process of trial and error.
• Embrace the team. The iPod doesn’t have a sole progenitor: there’s no single “Podfather.” It’s never just one person—success always has many fathers.
Chapter 8
Total Control: The Whole Widget
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”
—Steve Jobs
The launch of the iPhone in the summer of 2007 looked to many like Jobs was about to repeat the smash hit success of the the iPod—except for one thing. Jobs locked software developers out of the iPhone, at least initially. In the weeks following the launch, there was a storm of protest from bloggers and pundits who were furious that the iPhone would be a closed platform.