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Why Apple Is So Sticky
Hugh Pickens writes "'Sticky,' in the social sciences and particularly economics, describes a situation in which a variable is resistant to change. For websites or products it usually means that visitors or customers keep coming back for more. Now Fortune Magazine reports on an analysis by Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore on what makes the (iTunes-based) iPhone-iPod-iPad platform so sticky and why it's going to get harder, not easier, for Apple users to switch, no matter what Google and the rest of Apple's competitors have up their sleeves. Whitmore says the investment Apple's customers have made in content for those devices in terms of apps, videos, and music purchased at the iTunes Store creates Apple's 'stickiness.' Apple has an installed base today of about 150 million iTunes-dependent devices that could grow to more than 200 million by the end of 2011. Whitmore comes up with a cumulative investment in those devices of about $15 billion today, growing to $25 billion by the end of next year. 'This averages to ~$100 of content for each installed device,' Whitmore writes, 'suggesting switching costs are relatively high (not to mention the time required to port). When Apple's best-in-class user experience is combined with these growing switching costs, the resulting customer loyalty is unparalleled.'"
Why is Slashdot so stuck on Apple?
pretty much plays unprotected AACs, so there's no lock in there. As far as apps, many are used for a couple weeks and then forgotten or deleted. There may be a psychological lock in when looking at 100 apps, but in reality only a handful are used. At the iPad level, there are bigger and more useful apps which could be more of a lock-in factor, but there isn't much lock-in at the iPod and iPhone level. Hell, there will probably be a dozen comments in this story about slashdotters who switched from an iPhone to android.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sounds like, at least in Apple's case, "sticky" is just another word for "vendor lockin"
For websites or products it usually means that visitors or customers keep coming back for more.
For some websites on the Internet, "sticky" has a completely different meaning. :-)
And by "some" I mean "most", and by "websites" I mean "porn". To quote Dr. Cox on Scrubs, "If you shutdown all the porn sites on the Internet, there would only be one site left and it would be called 'Bring back the porn.'"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let's talk about applications only. Sure the average user may have purchased $100 worth of software, but how much of it do they actually use day to day? I think, just like a computer platform, that the cost of switching is lower than it would seem because most software does not need to be replaced, so the cost is lower than it would seem from simply examining purchase prices for everything you own.
Now throw in media... songs are pretty much sold DRM free these days, so there is no cost to migrate media. Video is tricker since through iTunes it is wrapped in DRM. But I wonder apart from children's video, how much video purchased online is really there to be watched again and again - I buy a lot of video online but after I watch it, I generally don't watch it more than once. I "buy" it knowing full well it's really more like a rental, and if I really like a video I'll buy it on physical media that I can load out or keep as long as I want.
There is something to the argument they make, I just don't think it's as strong on the value side as they make it out to be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... in that people are stuck with DOS/Windows/Office because the cost to switch away are too great.
I reject this statement because it is fundamentally not true.
Case in point, the iTunes interface is not intuitive and neither are many of the features. I'm not alone in this belief and I've seen many a novices confused by it. However, people eventually do learn to navigate it.
The same goes for the ipod interface. Thankfully my nano is rock box compatible and I was able to install something that was a bit easier to sync my music with.
I pretty much find all of their interfaces confusing and I really don't have the desire to learn them. Good news is that there are many alternatives on the market.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
OS X only exists to make people want to buy Apple hardware. Allowing OS X on commodity hardware would dilute their brand and suck buyers away from what they're actually trying to sell.
Yep. Apple computers never crash.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I know many people with Iphones, Ipads and Ipods, nearly all of them love the devices but hate Itunes, using it as the only option available to them. Several of my more computer literate friends are unhappy with the restrictions thier Ipods place on them regarding PC transfer rights and lack of backup options for their content, but most never even consider what would happen if their device failed and won't until it does...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
In general geeks like to beat up on some large incorporeal entity that a segment of the community will defend to the death. Microsoft just isn't all that fun to kick around anymore, since the only people who still care about Windows are CTO's and those of us unfortunate enough to work in the dark section of IT known as Help Desk. Apple has become a juggernaut of shiny devices that sell to a large segment of the population that would have never even considered buying a Mac. An even smaller percentage of that give a crap about "lock-in" or other political stances. OS X geeks are a small and defensive breed, and they feel that these devices, ostensibly still computers, are an extension of their ecosystem. They're not, and they are a gateway drug for some. They were for me, but the large chunk of the iPhone and iPod populace doesn't care, and whenever the new must have gadget comes around, they'll move on. Previous generations re-bought their entire collections in several different mediums, this one will be no different. Lock in sucks, and hopefully video vendors come around on DRM, but I think streaming on demand will leapfrog them anyway. So the Apple fans will defend Steve Jobs unique vision as if it was their own, and the geeks will beat this topic to death until there something else that people love to bitch about on the Internet. It isn't principled, it's pointless. En mass much of the ecosystem has turned from Redmond Bad Cupertino Good to Curpertino Bad, Mountain View Good. That will last until some new hip kid on the block becomes the Geek chic and we will then decry Google's constant assault on our privacy. Here's to waiting until Cannonical is the bad guy.
Agreed. I dislike most Apples interfaces. They certainly look clean which makes people think they're simple, but once you get into it they aren't any more intuitive than most Windows programs (and a lot less than some). The iPod I like (click wheel version I mean, not iPod Touch) but I dislike their OSs UI and the iPhone/iPod Touch UI. I use iTunes on Windows because I have an iPod, but wouldn't out of choice (there may be iTunes alternatives that work with iPods but I am yet to find a good one...next music player I get won't be an iPod anyway) and the UI works well enough, but is far from intuitive. The only other Apple software I use is Safari, which I use for testing websites and nothing more. That said, I am fairly familiar with a lot of Mac stuff since my dad (who I work with) uses one and I am essentially the administrator (I fulfill the role of "tech guy", among other things). Some of their stuff does "just work" but much of it doesn't, and is not really any better than Windows programs (some are good, some aren't). Even as a Mac guy, my dad doesn't use a lot of Apple software beyond small widgets (calculator, stickies etc) and the email app.
I think you're too kind to itunes. It's not a matter of intuitiveness, the software just sucks, period. With a hundred million devices, most of those users are going to be on Windows. And the Windows version of itunes carries along the ridiculously out-of-place Cocoa look and feel. Why anyone considers that acceptable (and why Apple thinks it's a good idea) is baffling to me.
The fundamental problem with your post is self-evident: "My Computer". If you were to use a Mac most of the updates etc. are done for you. iTunes automatically opens when you plug in your device, and after the initial setup syncing and updates are mostly automatic. Even "compiling" your library is dead simple, and things like the (piece-of-crap) genius playlists make it easier to find the music you prefer and all your podcasts are automatically downloaded and synced.
This is why Apple make it in the consumer market - the whole concept of "buy only our products" works - we see Microsoft and Linux fanboys going their respective routes as well (OpenMoko, Linux, Linksys Routers etc.) because they want it all to be the same. When that concept works and the software actually integrates nicely with the hardware (something that only apple, as a hardware company, are currently able to achieve because they write the software for their own hardware), the average consumer tends to enjoy. Now if only they had a decent server, I'd think about getting one.
Side note: Find me an easier to deploy and use solution than NetBoot/NetInstall (with DeployStudio) and I'll stop using a 27" iMac for my Windows 7-only gaming rig. That ability to image a machine on the spot with Target Disk or NetBoot is the major selling point for me.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
That's not entirely true. Last I checked Apple had requirements that standardized a lot of the interface components. With Windows it can be quite unpredictable as to where exactly you find a given option, even if you stick with MS' own software it's hardly a no brainer. Or in other words nobody seems to do a particularly good job of it.
Apple owner here. You have identified a sizable segment of the mac ownership demographic. The demographic that buys apple shit because "apple is cool and I want to buy cool" These people are known as "Mactards"
However there are two other sizable segments.
1) The segment that thinks that Apple is easier and "just works" when compared to Windows. They dont want to fuck about with their PC. (I disagree with these people because Windows7 "just works" too)
2) The segment that thinks that Apple is easier and "just works" when compared to Linux. They dont want to fuck about with configuration files and rc scripts anymore. I fall into this segment. I demand a usable and strong command line with all the proper *nix utilities, but I want a strong windowing system and dont ever want to fuck about with video card drivers ever again.
The apple gui/desktop is superior to kde/gnome/X... not all of us bought apple because apple is cool, some of us bought it while waiting for linux to become more polished.
I'd like to know where you got your kool-aid
This motherfucker jumped through my wall screaming "OHHHH YEEEAAAHHH" and then poured me a glass of kool-aid.
I reject this statement because it is fundamentally not true.
Case in point, the iTunes interface is not intuitive and neither are many of the features.
For novice users, I reject that any solution that is based around files (which I know you would prefer and sounds like what you are using) is easier for non-technical users to understand than the way iTunes works. You stated that you saw novice users confused by iTunes, but they got over it. Well I have seen a lot of novice users that never get over the confusion of how to deal with files.
iTunes "just works" for most users despite being somewhat nonintuitive, because the other solutions are either more clunky to set up or less intuitive still.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Duh.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Believe me, "It just works." I bought my Dad an iMac a couple years ago. Once he got used to quitting programs as opposed just hitting the red X and dragging and dropping programs to install them I've not had to field a single phone call the past couple years. I'm no longer spending an evening wiping his computer and reinstalling because he got a virus or spyware of some kind. And it only took him about a week to make that transition between christmas and new years.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I call bullshit on this one.
I call BS on your BS. I use iTunes and I like a couple of things about it, but it has its problems.
- Have you ever tried moving music in your library? Have fun cleaning up the invalid entries.
- In Windows there's all sorts of resource hogging software - services and helpers running ALL the time, regardless of if I'm using iTunes
- Ever tried to recover music back from your iPod? You use to be able to do that once upon a time, but they decided that there was too much potential for piracy
- My clickwheel has never quite worked right on my iPod. I should have had that fixed under warranty early on, but who knows how long I owuldn't have had my iPod for and what sort of cost/hassles I'd have gone through to RMA. Apple was making it VERY hard to RMA at one point here in Australia. The local consumer body had to step in.
- The click wheel interface sucks for large collections of music. Searching for a song on the iPod can be a pain.
- They make you jump through hoops to use certain features like Genius. In some countries you, like Australia you have to create an iTunes account and supply your credit card. When you "turn off" or don't enable Genius it still gets in the way
- Damn iPod screens attract scratches like moths to a flame. Keep some brasso handy.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've been saying for a while that the iPhone is no longer a "premium" brand. High school kids have them. If $100 is "relatively high", then those iPhone customers are not what Apple makes them out to be, especially when amortized over the cost of a 3-year phone plan - $100 is less than $3 a month. Less than $0.10 a day. How much cheaper can you get? Are iPhone customers reduced to saying "Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
Is this a serious point of view?
As a software developer, OSS advocate, multiple-os user, I couldn't disagree more.
My personal laptop is a 1st-gen MacBook Pro when they first made the Intel switch, and I'm using an iPhone 3G. Never used an Apple product until they made the intel switch, and I've loved every minute of OS X.
I still use Windows, Linux and Solaris for personal use, work use and for any other purpose, but if I had a choice I would undoubtedly choose OS X.
Why? Simple, it doesn't suck. I won't say "it just works", but it sucks a hell of a lot less then Windows or Linux. Surely, we can agree on Windows here, and Linux I'm not going to go into some kind of argument, but suffice to say my time is valuable (if not to others, to myself), I don't want to invest tens to hundreds of hours into simply configuring Linux to do what I want, when OS X does out of the box, with a cleaner and (more) unified interface.
Why did I get an iPhone instead of a phone with WebOS, Android or Symbian? Same goddamn reasons, WebOS is a tiny market, Android is fragmented and destroyed by the vendor specific distributions (sad, really, I wish this weren't the case -- or else i'd have gone here). When iPhone 3.0 came out, I was able to upgrade my phone instantly. When iPhone 4.0 beta came out, I was able to upgrade my phone isntantly. My buddy at work with his Android phone? He's stuck on something ridicuously old at 1.5 because he's at the mercy of the combination of his cell provider and handset maker to update their proprietary version of Android.
We all know that the cell phone providers have a long way to go in order to "catch up" with the technology we all want to use; and that's why I went with apple here. They used their brand power to strong-arm a major cell provider into giving them unified control. Sure, I'm "locked in" to Apple for my iPhone. But what do I get for that?
- Free (in a sense, not at additional charge) software and OS ugprades
- Largest app store by an order of magnitude (i seldom pay for anything, tons of free stuff available that do what I want)
- Unified interface to sync/get content (Sure, you see iTunes as locked in, but the app is free, purchased music is DRM free and there is simply no better alternative on any OS. So what the hell are you complaining about? Make a better competitor and maybe someone will use it.)
- The UI is smoother and more intuitive then any other device
- Flash? What? Android doesnt even run flash (except in latest betas, i believe, which wont see an actual piece of hardware for who knows how long, so dont give me that BS)
Until someone else can compete at this level (and that wont be for some time, if they are lucky), then I'll stick with my "locked in" platform, which, has more free and better tools available then the OSS alternatives.
By the way... small share of the market? Apple has moved (literally) over 50 million iPhones, and I believe significantly more iPod Touch's, and the US has a population of what.. roughly 330 million people, and lets say we make some broad assumptions that only about 1/3 (110 million) of those (cut out children, elderly) are even eligible iphone customers, thats nearly 50% market penetration. Small? Are you on crack?
Yes, that's 50 million world wide, but that is just a comparison to put it into perspective.
"I've not had to field a single phone call the past couple years."
So I guess he's really pissed and won't call you anymore. Sorry.
Lol, "You can avoid the lock in annoyance by buying a Mac and then buy only Apple products"?
+1 funny
The same goes for the ipod interface. Thankfully my nano is rock box compatible and I was able to install something that was a bit easier to sync my music with.
When I bought my 30GB click wheel 5th Generation iPod (iPod Video) I was able to figure out how to navigate the menus and use the device within a quick 30 seconds. Pretty much anyone I've given the device to can figure out how to use it quickly and easily, iTunes wasn't any more difficult.
In fact the combination is so incredibly easy the only time I get asked for help with iTunes is from those family and friends who aren't very good with computers in general and they want to burn a CD / DVD. Otherwise how hard is it to insert a disk, click Import and wait a while, eject the disk, click on "Music" in the side menu and see the recently imported disk listed there with all track names, artist, album information, and album art already taken care of automatically. When you plug in the iPod the whole thing auto syncs to the device and when I browse it I can find my music by album title, artist's name, song title, even genre if I so choose. If I had to guess, it was perhaps less than ten minutes from the time I installed the software to when I had my first album imported into iTunes and on the device.
I've taken a look at the Rock Box iPod Video install guide and skimmed through all 224 pages of it. The install instructions would be incomprehensible to pretty much anyone I've given my 30GB iPod Video to. Then there is the needlessly complicated navigation of the device, the ultimate use of it, and the need for a separate piece of software that, hopefully, stores the files in a very specific \Artist\Album\Track file directory structure so you can get some semblance of order when browsing your music on it.
Are you really trying to tell us that you couldn't figure out the simple stock Apple iPod / iTunes interface, even my 80 year old non technical grandmother can use my iPod without any coaching, yet you somehow have the technical ability to successfully flash an iPod with a copy of Rock Box and use its needlessly complicated, at least based on what I read in the virtual novel linked above, user interface?
Could I use Rock Box? Sure, taking computers apart and putting them back together has been a hobby of mine for more than 25 years. Am I going to? Perhaps when I replace my current iPod with a Touch or a much larger Classic, my 30GB is full and I still have better than a third of my CD collection still left to import, I'll consider it just for something new and interesting to do. For now though its nice to have a product that's easy to use and just works, where I don't have to spend hours screwing with it just to get it to do its primary function: playing music.
That's why I use Apple stuff, anyway. I'm on my second MacBook Pro (my wife took over the old one after 4 years of merciless use, and my son took over her MacBook). We also have two iPhones and an iPad. As if this wasn't enough, my company-issued laptop is also a MacBook Pro. You can tell I'm a satisfied customer.
The reason why I like Apple is their attention to detail. Backlit keyboard, fans that you can't hear (on a Core i7), gorgeous aluminum enclosure, pretty good (for a laptop) display, 7 hours of battery life, 1 inch thick. And it goes on and on from there. GPU acceleration in Aperture and core imaging APIs. Great PDF and color management support. Great audio subsystem. Great UI toolkit. GCC tool chain (and LLVM/Clang in Snow Leopard). Quick to wake up from sleep. Quick to start up and shut down. Automatic, transparent, on-the-fly versioned backups. Software bundle which is actually enjoyable to use (imagine that!). Drag-and-drop installation of apps (for most apps, anyway). And so on and so forth.
AND it's a certified Unix. Sure, you could probably hack it to run on something else (giving up power management and a few other "irrelevant" features), but if you have the dough, the attraction is undeniable. And Apple is perfectly fine with targeting only those who don't mind to pay for the best.
iTunes may be slow - I've waited for it many a time - but it's incredibly easy. You want the Cars' first album? Put it in the search bar, grab the files, drag to iPod. Every cover you have of a specific song? Search, click, drag. Try doing that with your directory-based file system and manual drag-and-drop.
So Slashdot historically loves Apple. Reason is twofold:
1) Apple is a historic underdog and Slashdot likes underdogs. They were the small guys fighting the evil that is MS, and Slashdot REALLY hates MS. As such they like Apple, or at least what Apple was.
2) Apple provides an easy to use alternative to Windows with some UNIX underpinnings. While many are loathe to admit it, Linux is a PITA for many desktop uses. Some of the people who use(d) it do so out of anti-MS zealotry and/or a UNIX superiority complex. Well, Apple offers an OS you can pretend is UNIX (even though that is just a minor foundation) that is easy to use and not MS. So, it is the sort of thing many /.ers like.
However, Apple is, and nearly always has been, a company far more controlling than MS. They want to dictate everything about your computer usage. They want you to have to buy hardware from them, in the configurations they specify only. They want you to use only their OS. They want to control where you get your applications and media, they want to tell you when to upgrade, etc.
This is, of course, counter to what Slashdot likes. However it was something that wasn't that apparent, nor that onerous back when Apple was the little guy. However as Apple has grown, it has become more and more obvious that their vision of the future of technology is one where they run everything.
So because of these two things, you see a lot of Apple stories, and a lot of stories on their lock in strategies. Don't expect it to change any time soon as Apple isn't likely going anywhere and the combination of love/hate will continue here.
I call bullshit on this one. Was hooking your USB cable into your nano too hard for you or something? Honestly tho, you drag your mp3s to the iTunes window, and you hook the iPod in. I can only imagine it being easier if the music was beamed directly into my brain.
Of course, the second time you try to add music to it, you'll probably end up with multiple copies of each song on there. I'm sure there are people who haven't had this problem with the iPod/iTunes, but I've yet to actually meet any of them. There's a reason that there's an iTunes menu function to try to find duplicates on your iPod and delete them, and the very existence of that is not a good sign.
The reason Apple is doing so well is that they turn out devices that suit the people's needs and are well-designed and reliable. This marketing bullshit about how Apple has some "secret sauce" is just nonsense promoted by those who can't research the stories they write - or those who want to turn out the same old junk and think they should be competitive just because they showed up.
The so-called competitors have been shown up for what they really are and they're squealing. Ever use a Motorola phone? How did you like their excuse for a user interface? Or have you ever used a Blackberry? How many times a week do you have to pull the battery to reboot it? Even the newer Droid phones - great concept, but they leave a lot to be desired in the execution. And that's just the cell phones.
How about tablets? I've used a HP TX series tablet and after that I bought an iPad. There's lots of noise from vaporware vendors but anything like competition for the iPad is nowhere in sight. At least HP looked at the way things are and killed their Windows tablet - they'll bring it out running Web/OS sometime in the future. Probably it'll be delivered by virgins riding unicorns.
Creating and building fully developed and well rounded products isn't a trivial task - Apple spent a lot of time and money making their iThingies good. For those companies who want to compete with Apple on this ground - they're going to have to get rid of their "good enough" mentality and create great products. And even then, they'll be months or years behind Apple. This isn't wrong or unfair; when all the geeks were kicking Apple while they were down, they had some good stuff brewing in the labs. Now that it's out on the street it's a different day and a different game.
I'm hoping that other corporations will be impelled to improve their game and actually compete with Apple. That would be good for everyone - but until they can compete in the market, the promotional BS is nothing more than vapor that isn't worth listening to.