RE: The Greatest Trick Steemit Ever Pulled Was Convincing The World It Didn't Exist
Incidentally, re: the ipod. Your take on it is a very typical "crypto" take on the success. All your focus is on marketing and hype, none on value. Its this kind of thinking that is a big part of the problem here on steemit. The problem is that hype can only take you so far.
Apple didnt didn't achieve dominance in the mp3 player industry with hype and advertising.... they achieved it by making a better product, with an easier to use interface and by backing that product up with an online store where you could buy things to play on your ipod for cheap.
They were the first to use firewire, and also the first to use USB (i think) (as opposed to serial cables and/or removable memory cards.
If you ever get the chance pick up one of creative's or archo's early mp3 players and take a look at what the interface was like
The second generation diamond rio had USB about two years before iPod. Where iPod really won was storage capacity (made possibly by using tiny disk drives instead of flash, which at the time was extremely limited), important because unauthorized file sharing (napster, etc.) had become massively popular with millions of users and the target customer base had very large libraries. Later on the music store became important, but it wasn't for early adopters, and like other authorized music download products, initially struggled to complete with unauthorized downloading due to: a) limited selection, b) poor value compared to buying a CD and ripping it, and c) DRM.
Nevertheless this supports your point that it wasn't all about marketing, although I'd argue marketing did play a significant role.
I was grasping around in my head for the Rio and also for the iriver when i wrote that comment and couldnt come up with either one. I was actually a huge fan of the keychain shaped irivers.... I was dead convinced that it was only a matter of time before they drove apple out of the mp3 player market:
But the diamond was my second choice. I had a later generation diamond the one with the red thumbstick.
IIRC, the interface on both was pretty terrible. you had to skip songs one by one, and the contacts on the buttons tended to get get worn out, making them less responsive, from the constant pressing.
I had one of those original Ipods. You are all correct in fact. It was a combination of marketing, a great product which some of the others also had but just not quite as slick and great design (which most of the competitors lacked).
I had a black Mp3 player from China about 2 or 3 months before the first ipod. It was USB, and I loaded songs onto it from my PC.
It basically looked like a small ipod; the display wasn't quite as nice, and it was smaller, however it looked almost identical, had a wheel and everything.
They took a product, improved it slightly, and then marketed the shit out of it. itunes happened because of the ipod, not the other way round.
Cg