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Comment by caudicus | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any exact quotes but (correct me if I'm wrong) Steve Jobs has historically been against a service like this, and said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track.

Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market. Yeah, he's still being a little up tight about iPhone App registration...but I guess my point is the man makes an initial guess of what's best for the company, but then listens to the market in the end, as he should.

Exciting stuff though. I'm psyched.

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everyone keeps saying jobs/apple changed their mind about the sdk. i don't believe it. i think it's that they knew they are in entirely uncharted territory here, and they wanted to take the time to do it right. and apple typically never pre-announces anything, so it wouldn't be like them to say "we're working on an sdk, it'll be ready in a year."

they pre-announced the iphone itself, but that was due to fcc issues. if they hadn't done that, the world would have known anyway, due to the paperwork they had to file.

"Steve Jobs [...] said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track. Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market."

Maybe he's just being deliberately misleading.

I guess then he'd need a motive to be misleading. Off the top of my head I could see him doing it to enforce his love for surprise in his demos...any other ideas?

I don't know how I'd feel if he was being deliberately misleading. He is still a CEO of a large publicly traded company...and should be somewhat upfront about what they're up to. I mean to hide is one thing, but to deliberately mislead?

His motivation is just being himself... you could correctly predict every single project Apple is secretly working on and he would adamantly deny every one, then confirm them all 2 days later at MacWorld. That's just how he is.

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