If there is a new technology, especially from Apple, that a large number of MeFites rush to pooh pooh, it is probably something that will permanently change the world.Except, as we all know, the iPod wasn't new technology. It was just a portable Mp3 player that happened to be much more heavily marketed. The first one marketed to regular people, not just tech nerds.
The iPod was revolutionary in that it opened the general consumers eyes to the world of mp3 players, and vaulted Apple into the world of premium consumer electronics.Those things weren't done by the iPod, they were done by the iPod's marketing campaign.
I revel in the Sony's repeated humiliations. Somebody needs to be made an example of for "this is what happens when you design products to restrict what the buyer is allowed to do." and a giant like Sony with a long history of screwing its customers by design, is sooo perfect.
AR: Would you talk briefly about some of the licensing and technical difficulties you had with making the Gescom minidisc?I really loved minidisc as a format and used it when I made my own electronic music. It's a shame it never took off, but it was all Sony's fault, in the end. Some restrictions are inevitable to keep shareholders happy, but they really shot themselves in the foot in locking down every aspect of the format, not only for consumers, but for content producers.
SB: DADC [Sony DADC is the group that produces digital content for Sony and controlled access to MD software and hardware] kind of... They wouldn't release any software for us to master the minidisc, so we had to use the same we'd use with CDs; that meant that we could only reach the maximum track limit at 99, because of the way it saves them. You can't get 255 tracks inside, even though the master minidisc specification allows 255 track IDs. So because of this we had to be really anal about every single PQ [track transition information] being in a really perfect position, for kind of random playing and stuff. When we got the test minidisc back from DADC, all the PQ points were like a few seconds early but by different amounts. Really strange, so we got in touch with support and asked what was going on, as all the PQ points were different. And they said, "Oh, erm, well, we tried to transcribe them directly and it didn't work, so we just put them in ourselves." We were going, well, it really kind of matters that they're in the right place! So, here are all the PQ points, thinking, oh, its quite simple we centered them digitally at the right positions, we won't have any problems. Send it back again, and they were all moved even further no, even more irregularly away from the original positions! Some were early, some were late. We had to get them to do it another two times, and we ended up releasing the third of the better ones. But it still felt really, really not right, do you know what I mean? We just kind of settled for the best of what they could offer for the time. It made it extremely difficult to produce it independently.
They basically wanted everything from Sony or equivalent labels, erm, and they wanted the runs to be of a certain amount before they'll give you any time whatsoever, you know what I mean? And obviously we weren't going to get many more than a few thousand made, so, I don't know, it's kind of a strange situation, really. Obviously they're not going to have time for you 'cause you're not Mariah Carey. We had given them something that we thought was actually technically quite simple, but they just found it impossible to do. So yeah, it's a bit of a problem, really. Plus it was the fact that they were saying things to us like, "There is no noticeable loss," even though we were saying, no, but there is noticeable loss with ATRAC [audio compression algorithm for minidiscs]. When we originally got in touch with them just to try to get some technical details on ATRAC, they were well sketchy! And they wouldn't give us the minidisc Red Book either, for ages; I had someone get it downloaded from someone else in DADC. Just like its a mega-secret, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm sure it's just a corporate policy, but at the end of the day... We're just not big enough investors to matter...
AR: Sony won't release any information on the NetMD format, either, which would let minidisc users perform digital transfers between a MD recorder and computer. This leaves open source projects with a big empty chunk of needed code missing and hurts the MD user community.
SB: As with the PlayStation... they've just kept it sewn up. I think the SDK for the PlayStation is like 250K pounds. I mean, I don't know anybody with that kind of money! So, but I know plenty of creative people who, given the opportunity, could write really tasty PlayStation software, you know what I mean? You have to kind of unlock PS2 if you want to do anything interesting... Terrible, really
Except, my worry is that if I was flying during said trip, that DHS might wonder why I was carrying so much digital storage and decide they were going to look through all of them. Luckily, I haven't had to travel air since all the main security theatre kicked in, as I on a prior trip was toting a Archos 80Gb and a laptop which had some media of "dubious provenance".That won't be a problem unless you're traveling internationally.
You know that most of the world is regular people and that's a pretty big market, right?OH MY GOD I HAD NO IDEA!
But you're going to do it anyway and insist it was marketing. No doubt the iPad is all marketing too, despite numerous commercials for rival tablets, it has to be the marketing, right?Plus the army of zealots who religiously tell everyone how awesome their products are. Anyway with the case of the iPad marketing is a lot more then just put adds on TV. It's also PR and managing relationships with journalists who go out and blab about how awesome your new products are, etc. There were lots of tablets on the market before the iPad came out, but when it did come out it was like the other tablets had never existed it. Another thing is the fact that lots of people in the newspaper and magazine industry thought this would save them, for some reason.
Exactly. I never really understood the idea of wanting to do all the work to manage files. Then again, I never understood wanting to make, like, 500 folders in outlook to organize emails by sender, but some people love to do this.It sounds like for most people, dealing with iTunes was the problem, especially if you wanted to share music with your friends. There was basically no way to do it. What could be simpler then dragging files around? The first DAP I got was a Sony that required special software (you had to convert the files to ATRAC, and play them from a memory stick) and it was a pain in the ass.
I remember reading that fateful Slashdot post. What a complete and total failure of imagination. I'm glad it gets quoted as a cautionary example, when naysayers bray their usual tune.Yes, the failure to IMAGINE that apple is just so much more awesome then everyone else, never mind the iPod never did anything that any other Mp3 player did, and did it worse. (requiring iTunes).
They have sold a hundred million iPods. And they've faced competition from Sony, Microsoft, and a ton of other companies that have 'marketing budgets' on par with their own. There are obviously dozens of products that have similar or better features and tech specs that have come and gone. And to blame their failure, as compared to the iPod, on marketing budgets is absolutely ludicrous.Sony never made an mp3 player, as far as I know. They've sold hundreds of millions of Play Stations, Microsoft has sold hundreds of millions of Xboxes, and billions of windows machines have been sold.
Claiming that 'marketing' is responsible for Apple's (illegitimate) success betrays a lack of understanding of what marketing actually is, and what consumers really care about. It's a tired and lame argument, and the last decade has proven you wrong.I never said anything about apple's "business success". Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Britney Spears, all of those things were successful in the market place. I find the idea of judging whether a product is good or not by how well it sells odd. Why should I care how well it sells?
Horn is correct that click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this method for moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox click-move-click method prone to error. Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm to pull-down menus. This all happened relatively early in the history of the Mac. The way my insight got extended by Bill was typical of how things developed then. Surprising as it may seem in retrospect, there was some resistance to my new way of using a graphic input device and I had to repeatedly explain how drag worked and why it was often easier to use than the modal click-move-click technique developed first (as far as I know) on the Sketchpad system and then used at Xerox PARC. Some of the arguments I used involved looking at number of user actions and the time they took, an approach that was then or would soon become the very useful GOMS model of Card, Moran, and Newell. Bill was a strong supporter of my ideas and at one session where I was explaining how drag worked Bill, by way of amplifying how useful it was, said something like, "And you can use it to open menus, just put the cursor on the top and drag down to the item you want."Both of these guys were Apple employees.
Seriously? The current range of Sony MP3 players.They never made one when it mattered. I don't know when they started making actual MP3 players, but it was a long time. When I said "never" I meant "never during the time they mattered"
Well, there's an example of poor marketing. Sony has been making PMPs since '99.I said Sony never made an MP3 player. I had a network walkman, I mentioned it in another comment. It was an ATRAC player, not an MP3 player. You had to convert the files to ATRAC before they would play. It was ridiculous.
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posted by leotrotsky at 9:40 AM on October 23, 2011 [24 favorites]