Actually, I was more taken by the combination of the clickwheel, good firmware and nice hardware design which together make an ipod an amazingly nice device to use - unlike most of their competitors who fell down on some or all of those and ended up with something that could physically hold a thousand songs but couldn't actually deal with them all.
Although, I suppose it might be that itunes forms another part of that; I've owned an ipod but never installed itunes. For a lot of people it probably is a big deal though, especially if the only alternative they'd seen was whatever awful thing Sony was packaging at the time.
I'm still not sure that any of the competition have really copied that. At least I haven't seen a replacement yet that really felt equally well done. My guess would be that too many companies think their "innovation" is going to be "it's cheaper" and compromise quality in order to get there.
Steve Jobs quoted Alan Kay with "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." I don't want to turn this into a "I hate/love Apple" discussion but I think that's what separated Apple from MSFT.
Apple had a track record of making their own hardware and software work together really really well. MSFT didn't really follow Alan Kay's hypothesis. I would say that is what the heart of Apple's success is, it's reputation for excellent software/hardware integration.
Google's copy-innovate system is going to work because they brought about good integration between their products (for the most part). That is why Google, like Apple, should generate a very good user-fan-base. Which I believe the article pointed out very well.
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Actually, I was more taken by the combination of the clickwheel, good firmware and nice hardware design which together make an ipod an amazingly nice device to use - unlike most of their competitors who fell down on some or all of those and ended up with something that could physically hold a thousand songs but couldn't actually deal with them all.
Although, I suppose it might be that itunes forms another part of that; I've owned an ipod but never installed itunes. For a lot of people it probably is a big deal though, especially if the only alternative they'd seen was whatever awful thing Sony was packaging at the time.
I'm still not sure that any of the competition have really copied that. At least I haven't seen a replacement yet that really felt equally well done. My guess would be that too many companies think their "innovation" is going to be "it's cheaper" and compromise quality in order to get there.
Steve Jobs quoted Alan Kay with "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." I don't want to turn this into a "I hate/love Apple" discussion but I think that's what separated Apple from MSFT.
Apple had a track record of making their own hardware and software work together really really well. MSFT didn't really follow Alan Kay's hypothesis. I would say that is what the heart of Apple's success is, it's reputation for excellent software/hardware integration.
Google's copy-innovate system is going to work because they brought about good integration between their products (for the most part). That is why Google, like Apple, should generate a very good user-fan-base. Which I believe the article pointed out very well.