The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard
sivers.org
sivers.org
Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.
It looks like it was published just now, so the author is looking at it in hindsight, knowing Apple's current reputation.
(I still agree with your comment, just thought that warranted consideration.)
Now it doesn't affect me at all - it's just an old tale I can tell, that someone might find entertaining or helpful.
Really more my fault than Apple's, for promising something to my clients before I had a signed contract in my hand.
But the way they made it sound at that initial meeting, with the full pitch, immediate contract, and short timeline, made it sound like the contract was a small technicality.
Lesson learned, as usual. ;-)
Jobs is capricious and doesn't tip his hand; the article's lesson of not basing anything on his (or any other person's or company's) whims is a pretty good one.
Soooo... may as well make it three times.
But what makes you think the Macintosh line will be abandoned by Apple? Mere aversion to product diversification? They discontinued the Xserve ("nobody buys the things"), but I have the impression that MacBooks and iMacs are selling quite well.
A common argument is "Well, what do you think people are using to develop for all those iPhones, iPods, and iPads?" The answer to that one is, "What do you think people are using to develop for XBox 360s and PS3s?" It's true that you need a Mac to write iOS apps, but that's an arbitrary corporate policy, and not an inherent requirement.
Without MacBook Pros, I don't know how they'd develop new versions of iOS. Systems coding on iPads? Would they actually use Linux? Neither seems likely, but I wouldn't put it past them to beef up iOS to the point that their devs are using it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if their new server line were to be based on 16-core ARMs running some form of iOS.
Sony doesn't mind people using PCs to develop for the PS3, and game development is murderously complex compared to anything developed for iOS either inside or outside Apple.
But their servers are all (I hear) XServes, and they basically eat their own dog-food, so I'd expect a follow-up of some sort.
You could be right but if there's a case for Apple to be in the server business, I sure don't see it.
Why, precisely, do you expect Apple to just throw away 25% of their business?
If you pitched that idea to Jobs, you'd probably be looking for work the next day. It would be that dumb.
I believe that iPod was supposed to be a complement of Mac but then it and its siblings grew so big that actually now other products are selling Macs.
Why would Mac kill their own development platform? Further, look Google as they thrash around desperate to diversify their revenue stream. Do you think it's sensible for Mac to go the opposite direction and pile all their eggs in one basket? Not to mention all the effort that went into creating this new unibody form factor. Should they just throw away all the resources they've put into doing that?
I think Apple will put less emphasis on the Mac in the next years, simplifying the line and reducing the products in the market, not so fast as he wishes, and this will be a trend in the entire industry, not only Apple. But that's my opinion and not a detailed analysis.
Apple has already put less emphasis on the Mac. OS X has largely stagnated since 10.5 came out in 2007, right around the time iOS started coming into the picture.
And if you look at what's coming in 10.7, it essentially reads like they're trying to turn the desktop into iOS. It's not an approach I'm particularly thrilled about; interfaces that make sense of small, touch-driven displays don't make as much sense on huge, high resolution displays, IMO. But Apple is letting their UI development for the former drive their desktop UI development.
Answered in several other places in the thread.
Owning your own development platform is highly overrated.
No man is an island, and certainly no corporation the size of Apple is one, either. Vertical integration shouldn't be considered a religious matter.
Somewhat irrelevant, as Apple has demonstrated fairly convincingly that they do consider it such.
Now, you could say that Apple didn't fab it's own PPC chips, but the x86 mac hardware is sure a lot more similar to everyone else's hardware than mac hardware has ever been before, and it's probably saving Apple rather a lot of money.
Of course, you could also argue that this trend is reversing, with the Apple platform now being driven by ARM devices that are far more, uh, custom. but you kind of have to do that right now, because the market for cellphone chipsets/motherboard layouts isn't as mature as the market for desktop/laptop chipsets and motherboard layouts.
I'm just pointing out, Apple is perfectly happy to use commodity stuff, when they think that commodity stuff is better/cheaper.
You may think owning your own development platform is overrated but you haven't demonstrated that at all and not everyone agrees. Worse you go on with this controversial opinion and built an entire alternative universe based on it. Are you a writer for the Enquirer or something?
(Shrug) Don't ask questions if you don't want people to answer them.
So? There were turf-wars and in-fighting between product teams when Apple actually was a startup.
>Third, Steve wouldn't stand for it.
Most accounts I've heard are that Steve was a driving force in that early in-fighting. Of course, he's 25 years older and has probably matured some, but I don't know that I agree with the assessment that he wouldn't tolerate it.
'Enterprise-y' Apple deployments will probably still be an option, just not in a rack.
Not to continue this off-topic digression too much further, but a Mac Pro running OS X Server is in no way a replacement for an "enterprise" XServe deployment.
For a full explanation, see this TidBITS article:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/11735
tl;dr version: The Mac Pro takes up 4x the rack space and lacks hot-swappable power supplies and drive bays, making it an awful fit for most 24x7 server environments.
Are you sure? For all we know, Jobs really did fire him for his voice.
And this is probably the biggest reason why Apple continues to be a minor blip on the enterprise market.
I think this is an example of the Jobs reality distortion field. Geeks, at least, did distrust Apple back in ~2000. Consider high geek Neal Stephenson's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Com... essay written back in the dark ages of 1999 :
> "It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
> It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them."
We started encoding and uploading immediately."
What really struck me about this post is that he went back to Apple after being disrespected so hard. The lesson is there are times when you have to swallow a big lump of pride in order to better your business. I know I would have a hard time doing that.
Its probably the same for Walmart suppliers.
Thanks for helping out the indies, sivers.
I have bought more than a couple of CDs from CD Baby and thanks to them I've been able to connect with more than a couple of wonderful artists.
However, from Apple's perspective, it must have seemed like CD Baby was simply trying to make a profit simply by guaranteeing access to the Apple Store, and therefore Apple decided not to move forward in order to protect its brand.
Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a positive public spin on their delay.
I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them. So his keynote seemed to be a decision. Instead, it was just an important lesson on spin and circumstance.
i think because you walked away in a classy way you demonstrated power and that brought them back to the table.
Negotiating with the majors for content and pricing and access was worst hard-ball negotiations I've ever seen and schizophrenic at that. One of their big fears of course was enabling a market that would erode their competitive advantage in distribution and allow smaller players to sell music in ways indistinguishable from their own.
I have no direct inside knowledge, but I'd bet big you were just on the ass end of a power play that otherwise had little to do with CD Baby. Your catalog was a huge stick that could have been wielded in many ways in those fights. The contract that arrived the next day had an NDA, so suddenly you weren't able to disclose the terms of any deal you might have right?
As an aside, congratulations for sticking with your model and your principles and surviving that whole decade. It wasn't easy at all to make it in that market, my resume is just a bunch of smoldering craters from that period.
It could be that Steve Jobs was somehow being manipulative and singling out CD Baby. Or it could just have been that the company was bogged down. You said yourself that hundreds of others were at that original meeting. That's like herding cats. In fact, the entire iTunes Music Store was an exercise in herding thousands of cats. I still have a hard time believing it got done.
Regardless, it's still a good tale. You never know, right?
That's interesting. I wonder if you or anyone else had raised a question about this at the presentation. Communication is a key aspect of partnership. And if there is little communication, or terms on communication SLAs, then there is plentiful scope for ill partnership.
Reading your notes about the presentation on Slashdot, it appears that Apple had thought very carefully and prepared extensively about the iTunes business model. I am pretty sure they must have had something about this aspect as well. Its pretty surprising that no one else on the other side raised anything about it.
I would suggest that one of the most important ways to protect your brand is not to be evil. I believe Microsoft failed at this (it is why I switched away from using their products). Apple is now currently failing here at an even greater degree (I currently own a Macbook and an iPhone, but I believe these will be my last Apple products).
It is one thing for a company to want the best experience for its users. But blocking musicians from their fans is not the way to go about this, no matter how small the musician or fan. You can still have a great store for the general populace, and still allow everyone else to access and share the data they want.
The data must flow.
This should help clarify it:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis...
Also this is a lesson in on how to have only loosely-coupled relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big).
When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and have a back-up plan.
Apple's ability to spin is amazing, but not as amazing as the number of people eating up every word of it without thinking about what they are hearing.
I typed this from my 3.5 inch iPhone.
Steve Jobs is an absolute marketing genius. He's not exactly an unbiased observer.
If somebody bothered to go through all the keynotes and other statements there would a lot of examples.
There is nothing wrong with this, it means Apple can adapt - but you shouldn't take everything they say as true forever
Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK."
It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to automate this process.
If you really had lossless wavs and data, you could have emulated a 'CD' and had the apple software rip it, then put in the tags. Probably would have saved thousands of man hours compared to putting physical CDs in the drives.
All turned out wonderful in the end. We never needed to re-rip the CDs after all. Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. An incredibly efficient way of delivering over 2 million songs+metadata from one company to another.
A nice little collection of Ruby & PHP scripts on a stack of Linux servers & Windows encoding boxes did everything.
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to open-source that software since I sold it.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper and quicker to send a few hard drives with the data on by post?
They'd perhaps need an intern for that as a short term project. After the initial c.900000 music file (100,000 albums) then uploading would probably be more feasible.
900000 tracks of 5MB (assuming lossy compression) at 10Mbps would take over 40 days of 24-7 uploading (not allowing for errors and outages and such). 10Mbps was still quite fast for uploads in 2003 I think (faster than the current average in the US according to DSLreports). S-ATA RAID0 write bandwidth was about 34MBps at the time, roughly 27 times faster than the network in-flow; I'll assume read was faster and so this is the limit for disk-to-disk transfer. Assuming shipping took a couple of days you'd expect to finish the transfer a month quicker.
I'd be interested in how it would be cheaper for Apple for the initial round to accept uploads only, especially given this retards the lead time (to selling the tracks) by a month or more.
At least that's what he says...
This has always struck me as interesting point from a music fan's perspective. It seems like the confluence of a lot of factor's led to expansion of independent music around this time.
2001, 2002 was around when cable and DSL prices started to drop outside of major cities. The opening of Itunes. And seemingly a lot of big time independent artists began to jump to major labels (or made major releases from smaller labels) and released very successful albums. Death Cab for Cutie, The Shines, and Modest Mouse off the top of my head.
Just an interesting phenomena I've always been curious about. This article was eye opening as to what one of the key forces in this move might have been.