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The Press Releases of the Damned
Harry writes "Once upon a time, Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it. Palm said its Foleo was a breakthrough. Circuit City said firing its most experienced salespeople would save the company. And Apple said that Web apps were all that iPhone owners needed. I've collected the original press releases for these and other ill-fated tech announcements, and annotated them with the facts as they played out in the real world."
By what definition? The first model sold a few hundred thousand. That's not bad considering that other models were selling in the tens of thousands at the time. In 2001, the MP3 player was relatively new to consumers; there were probably more portable CD players sold than MP3 players at the time.
See that's why Apple succeeded. For millions and millions of consumers, they don't care about any of that. Geeks might care but your average consumer doesn't. Apple was the first to understand that the MP3 player could be a consumer gadget if they polished the rough edges of the early MP3 players. And it wasn't about just style. It was about making the thing consumer usable not geeek usable. Yes, the iPod isn't the most technical superior device, but again, consumers don't really care. So what if it can't play ogg? Most consumer don't even care if they have MP3s or WMAs or AACs. They just want the device to to easily manage and play their music regardless of the file format. Consumers want to buy music online so Apple went to the trouble of creating a music store.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.