ON APPLE'S SECRET SAUCE

RE-THINKING DIFFERENT

Newsweek has a great interview with Apple's Steve Jobs that's a good, quick read.  The occasion, the upcoming fifth anniversary of the iPod. 

Number of Q&A good bits in the article.  One of my favorites is Steve's answer to Newsweek's question:

"Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?"

One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless."

It's something I hadn't heard before. 

While the whole piece is not quite the "must read" eloquent speech by Jobs from June, 2005, that I highlighted a few months ago, but it's worth a read.

Comments

[howard lindzon]

worth a read if you can navigate the ads on the newsweek site. what a mess of a site. Just horrid.

[KE Liew]

It's rare to have cases where user-orientated products take the unimaginable dip of no return.

From what I can see, Apple do their best to look into the interest of the user. Just as Microsoft is doing (in terms of usability and support), and even Google. But of course, the whole business-perspectives must be inside the picture to get the whole thing running as huge as it is.

[Yaser Anwar]

IMO, the reason Apple has been so successful with iPods is due to simplicity.

Just like S. Jobs says in the interview, "Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple."

The ease of navigation & Apple's patent protection for it are the real reasons people use it. Simplicity is beauty, that's why you see the Zune till Sandisk's player, all trying to emulate the simplicity but the patent stands in between.