Woz On Apple's Success

Frankenbuffer writes "The Globe and Mail today has a short interview with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Steve muses on spinning off iPod as a separate division. He also questions the move to Intel." From the article: "Microsoft wants to get out of the whole image of the big, black Darth Vader evil guy ... Innovation is probably going on within the company, because any time you put smart engineers in places eventually they wind up talking and innovating no matter how much you try to hold them back. I hope Microsoft improves and becomes more like Apple."

Comments

Re:Innovate?

[2nd Post!]

Actually, Dell's discontinued DJ was made by Creative. From another post, my rebuttal as to why the iPod is successful:

1) Designing a better Jukebox in 2000; true, they got the basics from C&Gs SoundJam, but they have added strong features to it over the years, to the point that now everyone takes for granted the things Apple added. Being free helps too. In order to get Sony SonicStage you have to buy a Sony MP3 player. In order to get Creative Lab's MediaSource you have to buy a Zen or MuVo.
  A) Smart Playlist support (database driven)
  B) Integrated ripping, cataloging, and indexing
  c) Live search
  D) External MP3 synchronization (as far back as Creative Nomad Jukebox in 2000)
  E) Free (compared to MusicMatch or Xing or Creative or Sony)

2) Designing a better MP3 player in 2001; they didn't do it first, but they did do it better.
  A) Denser: the Nomad was physically larger, the smaller Rio PMP held much less
  B) Faster: the Nomad and Rio uploaded at USB1 speed, or 1mb/s, while the iPod could hit 16mb/s
  C) Simpler: the comparable Nomad had 11 buttons and required two hands; the iPod only had 5 buttons and could be used with one hand
  D) Faster: the use of the iTunes index meant you could keep the entire music index in memory (it had 32mb!) instead of crawling through the harddrive
  E) Simpler: the use of iTunes meant synchronization was simple: Plug in and 10 minutes later all 5gb was full, while on a Nomad it would take a couple hours

Since then they have done four things to stay in the lead:

A) Made iPods cheaper (Compare $499 for 5gb in 2001 vs $299 for 30gb in 2006)
B) Made iPods more powerful (Compare MP3 in 2001 vs AAC, video, and pictures in 2006)
C) Made iPods smaller (Compare the G1 vs G5 iPods; half the thickness)
D) Added new models (nano and shuffle, mini, color)
E) Continued improving the iTunes experience, as listed above

All the others added these features after Apple; if they had done so before, perhaps they would be number one instead? Creative added their Zen Micro after the iPod mini. They added the Zen after the iPod, with several laptop HD based MP3 players in the interim (still too big!). The Vision:M is still bigger than an iPod with Video, despite similar specs.