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iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003'
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
An entirely new approach to running a business isn't cool? Did we learn nothing from the dot-bomb experience? Consider this:
1. Alienate potential customers, existing customers and existing resellers of your products.
2. Piss off biggest computer company in the world
3. Piss off regulatory groups in many countries in the world
4. Make unsubstantiated demands for money from complete strangers. Provide no mechanism whereby said strangers can pay the requested money
5. Threaten all and sundry with lawsuits. Specifically refuse to tell anyone the basis for these lawsuits, with the explanation that doing so would allow people to stop "breaking the law" which would be unacceptable
6. Issue verbal indemnities to potential lawsuit recipients, based on constantly changing criteria. Ensure nobody can tell whether they're actually indemnified or not, which actually isn't that big a deal as nobody knows what the basis of the lawsuits is anyway (refer previous point)
7. Continue distributing for free that which you proclaim to be illegal to give away. Distribute it under a licence that specifically says "it's OK to give this away"
8. Sell product in blatant violation of the rights of the owners of the product. Simultaneously complain that others are doing the exact same thing with "your" product
If the Iraqi Information Minister was cool - and who among us thought he wasn't THE man for 2003? - then this is also cool.
I've seen that so-called "invisible" cloak before, and I wish they'd stop calling it that. It is a special effects technique nearly as old as cinematography. Someone wears reflex material while a scene is front-projected onto them. I don't think much of it as a stealth technique. FX man (walking up to armed guard at secure installation): 'scuse me, would you mind looking through this beam splitter while I set up a projector at your feet? Thanks! --Metryq
Compere: Well, you can't get much more interesting than that, or can you? With me now is Mr Thomas Walters of West Hartlepool who is totally invisible. Good evening, Mr Walters. (turns to empty chair)
... Even now you yourself, you do hardly notice me...
Walters: (off-screen) Over here, Hughie.
Compere turns to find a boringly dressed man sitting by him.
Compere: Mr Walters, are you sure you're invisible?
Walters: Oh yes, most certainly.
Compere: Well, Mr Walters, what's it like being invisible?
Walters: (slowly and boringly) Well, for a start, at the office where I work I can be sitting at my desk all day and the others totally ignore me. At home, even though we are in the same room, my wife does not speak to me for hours, people pass me by in the street without a glance in my direction, and I can walk into a room without...
Compere: Well, whilst we've got interesting people, we met Mr Oliver Cavendish who...
Walters: (droning on)
This isn't me attacking the United States; however, you must certainly concede that MANY companies in the states are focused primarily on their domestic interests without seeing that there is a global community forming.
If I wanted to attack the United States, I would bring up things like.. say.. the fact that a movie star is now the govenor of California, that the president is a complete and total moron who has, in a little over a year, managed to destroy much of what the United Nations stood for, the fact that the US government continually lies to it's citizens, the fact that the goverment brainwashed the US populus with the Sept 11-Terrorist / Iraq-Saddam connection. (2/3rds of the citizens of the US think that Iraq was involved in the Sept 11 attacks. The ENTIRE REST OF THE WHOLE WORLD knows that this was false and the country was lied to.) Or the right-wing government. Or privatized health care. I can continue, but this is about iTunes and Apple.