Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [89]
Apple, on the other hand, has a much smaller hardware base to support, and the results are much more predictable. In addition, if something goes wrong, there’s only one company to call. Customers of Dell or Compaq dread phone-support hell, where the hardware maker blames Microsoft, and Microsoft blames the hardware maker.
“PlaysForShit”
Take Microsoft’s music system PlaysForSure, launched in 2005. Licensed to dozens of online music companies and manufacturers of portable players, PlaysForSure was supposed to be an iPod killer. It would offer competition and better prices. Trouble is, it was unbelievably unreliable.
I had several of my own nightmare experiences with it. I knew there were problems, but I was truly shocked at how crap py it was. In 2006, Amazon.com introduced a video download service called Amazon Unbox. Launched to great fanfare, the service promised hundreds of movies and TV shows “on demand,” which could be quickly and easily downloaded to a PC hard drive with a single click. The service promised that video could be copied to PlaysForSure devices like an 8-gigabyte SanDisk player I was testing.
Actually, Amazon didn’t promise its video would play on PlaysForSure devices; it said video might play on PlaysForSure devices. “If your device is PlaysForSure-compliant, it may work,” said Amazon’s website. May work? Surely this was a joke? The point of PlaysForSure was that media would play for sure. Alas, it didn’t. After fiddling with it for hours, plugging and unplugging the player, restarting the PC, reinstalling software, and searching the Web for tips, I gave up. Life’s too short.
The problem is that Microsoft makes the software that runs on the computer, but SanDisk makes the software that controls the player. Over time, Microsoft made several upgrades to its PlaysForSure software to fix bugs and security problems, but to work properly with the new software, SanDisk players also had to be updated. While Microsoft and SanDisk tried to coordinate the updates, there were sometimes conflicts and delays. The more companies involved, the more the problems confounded. Microsoft struggled to support dozens of online stores and dozens of player manufacturers who, in turn, had shipped dozens of different models. Hardware companies had a hard time persuading Microsoft to fix PlaysForSure problems, which included glitches transferring subscription songs and even failures to recognize connected players. “We can’t get them to fix the bugs,” Anu Kirk, a director at Real, told CNet.5
In addition, all the troubleshooting had to be performed by the user, who had to seek out the latest updates and install them.
Apple, on the other hand, was able to issue similar upgrades to tens of millions of iPods quickly and efficiently through its iTunes software. If there was a new version of the iPod software, iTunes would automatically update the iPod when it was plugged into the computer—with the user’s consent, of course. It was, and is, a highly efficient, automated system. There’s only one software application and, essentially, one device to support (even though there are several different models).
At the time, there was a lot of criticism of Apple’s growing monopoly of the online music market and the tight integration between the iPod and iTunes. And while I object intellectually to being locked into Apple’s system, at least it works. I’ve used an iPod for several years, and it’s easy to forget how seamless the iPod experience is. It’s only when things go wrong with your gadgets that you stop and take notice. In the years I’ve been using an iPod, I’ve never had a problem—no lost files, no failure to sync, no breakdown of battery