A lost cause we’ve never lost
Not new news, but Apple’s market share was bigger than Dell’s for a day or two.
Apple is really starting to click along. It’s funny to me how the most exciting things from any computer companies in the last 5 years have always been from Apple. Maybe it’s been almost the last 10, since the iMac. When the iMac came out, companies couldn’t “iMac-ize” their products fast enough. Remember the clear candy-colored shells for the George Foreman grills? The iMac, the iPod, the TiBook, the Aluminum PowerBooks (including the massive 17″). The newer notebooks from Dell and Compaq are silver, more compact, with sleeker lines. I’m not saying they were influenced by Apple (but they were).
But people are still, “Oh Apple will never make it!” “It’s just a matter of time until Apple goes bankrupt!” “They can’t maintain their market forever! It’s too small to matter!” I just don’t understand the reasoning. Unlike some PC manufacturers, Apple makes a profit on the computers they sell. They also seem to be doing quite well for themselves lately.
Microsoft is throwing money away on every XBox sale, and the 360 has been a major disappointment so far. But Bill Gates still thinks the “iPod killer” is coming. How’s that for business acumen?
Other than a few hardcore geeks who HAVE to build themselves, I don’t know that I’ve ever talked to someone who genuinely enjoyed using their PCs. (PC fanboys, feel free to come out of the woodwork if you don’t meet the first condition . Tell me how your Dell has changed your life.)
The number of anecdotes from Apple owners along the lines of, “*Brief stunned silence* I opened the box and it just works.” is outnumbered only by the anecdotes of PC users along the lines of “I opened the box and then spent the next 3 days on the phone with tech support . . . 2/3 of which was on hold!” That’s not to say that Apple computers don’t face their share of OOB (out of box) nightmares, but the owner experience among the users who don’t face those problems seems significantly and characteristically more positive than the similar group among PC users.
Why would it be important to have an “iPod killer” anyway? I think the other device makers in some ways are missing the true thrust of what the market is demanding. The iPod is not the only real device in the sense of feature set; many devices offer more/better features. But it is part of the only truly integrated solution. There are some good PC devices, but the general interface between user and music is so confusing (I’m not talking about the device’s own interface).
Do you use MusicMatch or Wal-Mart’s music or MSN’s store or Real’s or the “new improved” Napster? Do you really own the music you download? Subscription costs? No one on the PC manufacturer side seems to get that when people buy music they don’t really want choices (except in content). They want something simple like the CD. You buy a CD from any store, you pop it in, it works. You don’t want to have one artist on CD, one on cassette, one on 8-track, and then also have to go to separate stores to find each format.
Apple can give people that truly simple experience with the iPod, iTunes, and iTMS. No one else can currently, and I don’t see any plans to do so from the major vendors. Microsoft particularly seems to want to replicate their horizontal integration with the software market in the music business. I don’t think they’ve realized that vertical integration works for digital music.
And if they don’t do something quick it will work for video content, too.
It’s not that other companies can’t be successful in the digital music market. I just think that they’re too married to what worked for the software market to see that consumers are asking for something different in the music market.
This has been partly provoked by my experience this weekend with the iTMS and partly by a conversation with another friend of mine. (Actually, it’s ripped, with a lot of editing, from an IM bitch-fest we had. We have those a lot.) I have to say, I was a bit skeptical about the store. I like to have the CD itself. I like looking at them. I like my collection of music. For Christmas, though, my roommate got me a gift certificate to the iTMS, and I’m certainly very glad he did. From beginning to end the experience of shopping, buying, downloading, and transferring (between my laptop and desktop, a Mac mini) was painless, easy, and worked exactly like it should have.
If Sony and Toshiba aren’t careful, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is going to be a disaster. Consumers want choices in content, not in format/delivery. Get it together and do us all a favor: standardize the user experience.
