"Ten years ago to this very week, Steve Jobs killed Apple. Or he began to take apart many of the projects and organization that many inside and outside the company thought of as Apple's value to the computing industry. This event was the announcement of the company's infamous spring 1997 reorganization, which continued step-by-step throughout the spring. For the company's long-suffering developers and ISVs, push came to shove at the annual WWDC, where Steve Jobs revealed his plans for Apple's future direction. Today, with the iPod-influenced haze over of recent Apple history as well as the success of Apple's retail strategy and the Intel-Macintosh transition, we forget that some of that 'future' talked up in 1997 never happened."
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Member since:2006-01-02
What's equally fascinating is that the best thing to supplent the iPod for this is most commonly run on...iPods. RockBox offers an excellent alternative to the standard iPod+iTunes (or other third party software to manage the library) setup. Sandisk, though, seems to be the only company even coming close to supporting it. Also, no one makes anything remotely equal to the iPod standard or Rockbox.
Any number of companies making players could easily compete with the iPod. The problem is that practially none of them, save a couple Korean ones, appear to be interested in making any single best of breed product.
Apple has taken longer than most to get a product out (very late on a decent flash player, as one case), but make it count when it comes.
That the question still stands I think says a lot about the general culture of big businesses than any technical or creative limitation.
Member since:
2005-08-02
"How hard could it possibly be to create a media consumption device and associated distribution service that offers a better value (and lifestyle) proposition than the iPod?"
The question still remains, if it's so easy to do, then why hasn't anyone else done it?