Re:Sucess in marketing.
on
Birth of the iPod
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...or maybe people who praise the iPod are willing to "pay extra for the particular features which the iPod has" and don't give a shit what anybody else thinks.
But I understand how that might contradict your notion that anybody who disagrees with you must be overly susceptible to marketing hype.
"I was under the impression that when it comes to most products, cheapness rules"
Manufacturers like Ferarri, Bang & Olufsen, and Rolex disagree with you. So do their customers. There certainly is a market for the cheapest available object that (allegedly) accomplishes a task. There is also a market for quality products that actually DO accomplish the task (which are often purchased by people who got burned on the first set of objects). And there is also a market for luxury goods, where really top-drawer industrial design is more important than low price.
Like the Dell DJ? Great. Go buy one. If it suits your needs, I think that's dandy.
The rest of your post is just wanking, trying to fit the facts as you (mis)percieve them to your preconceived notion that "success in marketing is the key". You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I happen to think it's bollocks.
Unless this guy compared the two players with the same (good) pair of headphones, I wouldn't believe his "louder and clearer" claims are worth the Internet they're printed on.
Sound quality is HIGHLY subjective, and comparisons based on anything other than controlled double-blind tests are meaningless.
Seems to me like really good UI design is rather a different thing from "style". I mean, I suppose the iPod is stylish (it's WAY more stylish than I am, that's for sure) but good design is way more than "style".
I've got a pair of Sennheiser wireless cans. They set me back $200 two years ago, and they are pretty mediocre. They sound pretty good when they deign to lock in to the base station's signal, but they were not worth what I paid for them.
It's hard to imagine Apple would have been able to come up with a substantially bettwer wireless headphone system that fits their style requirement (the Sennheiser cans look like you're weraring earmuffs) without placing themselves into Bang & Olufsen pricing territory.
There are a few pairs of BT headphones just now coming out, but I'm unconvinced that BT has anywhere near the bandwidth for good fidelity. I hope i'm wrong...it's a great idea. But it's not ready yet.
....after you turn around three times widdershins, wave a dead chicken over the machine, and feed all your music through Sony's ATRACk musicfuckerupper.
Actually, I was referring to my personal end-user decision to install Flash, because it's my bandwidth (by virtue of the fact that I pay for it) and my client resources (because it's my computer). If I were a web admin that didn't like Flash, or a server admin who didn't like Flash, I would be totally free to not use it. However, I'm a happy web user, who thinks that Flash (especially since I've got Adblock installed) is just fine.
The accessibility concerns are certainly valid ones, but since I have the good fortune to have full use of the nominal human sensorium, I am delighted to be able to enjoy me some h*r. : )
If you tell iTunes to keep your music organized, it will TOTALLY NUKE your directory structure and make you a Very Sad Person. It happened to me, and I was really pissed (until I decided I didn't care about the file structure).
iTunes' ID3 tag editing is pretty darn robust, though. Give it a good once over...I vastly prefer it to Tag & Rename for pure ID3 management (although it can do very little with file name and file structure).
And I, too, would love to be able to nuke duplicates. I just blew through a 5000 files by hand in iTunes, getting rid of dupes. Ideally, the app would go through all the audio and ask you "Hey, these two sound the same to me. I'll play one in the R speaker and one int the L, and you tell me if you want me to get rid of one."
Anyhow. Maybe I'll check out encspot and see if it's vaguely useful. What I really want, though, is for musicMobs.com to be able to populate the album art in iTunes. That would be teh roolz.
I'm sorry, I was cross posting from another branch of this discussion.
Foobar is (to my first impression) a really crappy MP3 player whose only virtue seems to be "doesn't take much RAM". I was seriously underwhelmed.
Your iTunes takes a bit more RAM than my iTunes. So I wouldn't call it a "major" RAM hog, and it is certainly worth the bloat IMO.
I am in the final stages of finally acquiring a Powerbook. I've been a Mac geek for a while, but only with Classic OS. I am seriously amped about playing with some nice state-of-the-art Mac hardware with OSX.
Color me gleeful. : ) Come to me, beautiful 12" 1.33 gHz Powerbook of my dreams!
Fair enough. You might note that iTunes can handle all that information in the ID3 tag, and you can use smart playlists (think queries) to suit your listening fancy.
So, when I get new music what I do is immediately clear any genre tag that might have been applied by somebody with a different set of sensibilities than I have. I'll listen to it a couple times over a few days, give it a rating (which can be used as a search criterion) and pick a genre. I can also add in the date the album came out (I haven't done this with any consistency at all yet) and, of course, assign track and disc numbers (if necessary).
So, instead of having a big hierarchial table (what if I want ALL the Madonna music, not just her "Pop" stuff?) I have a nice database I can query (Play me all music with an artist including Madonna) or (Play me all music with a genre of "pop" that has a rating of three stars or greater) etc etc etc.
A friend of mine really enjoys his "High School" playlist. He set up a smart playlist that brings back music that came out during his sentence in high school, some of which he knew at the time and some he didn't. It's a good idea, and a difficult one to implement with a filename-based approach.
I don't mean to sound like an evangelist, but I've been looking for a flexible, easy to use way of organizing and querying my music, and iTunes has done/absolutely everything/ I could ask of it.
Except take up less memory. Currently, it is only a little less bloated than Firefox. Remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lightweight browser?
All my grocery store loyalty cards are filled out in the name of former Soviet premiers. Unfortunately, I never get any amusingly-addressed junk mail, because I put the address as 123 Kremlin St.
Have you tried using iTunes to fix your mp3's? For me, it was a constant struggle with tag & rename and winamp, but it was a cinch in iTunes.
That assumes that there is SOME data in the tag, because if everything's just encoded by filename, I don't think iTunes can parse the filesystem hierarchy.
At first, I was livid that iTunes had flattened my genre\artist\album structure to artist\album, but that just encouraged me to go fix all my genre tags (which wound up being quite easy) and using smart playlists to organize my tunes.
Sure. But iTunes still WORKS BETTER. Have you used it at all?
Once I figured out what they were trying to accomplish with that xml database, it was a revelation. I'm serious: That database kicks ass. It makes managing a big music collection FAR simpler.
I did finally get FOobar to work, but the interface is way assy. I'll be glad to give iTunes all the RAM it wants.
That's a good point. Buying one share of stock in order to receive stockholder data could certainly not be construed as an "investment" (which to my mind is the same as an endorsement of the company's business practices).
So, you're right. There should be a distinction between buying a stock in order to gather intelligence, and making an investment in a company with the expectation of profiting from their unethical behavior.
Save money on textbooks? HAH! What a quaint idea. This will just enable textbook companies to change editions more rapidly, forcing next semester's students to buy the new book, and making your current edition worth a little bit less than the paper it's printed on.
The textbook companies will continue to rape buyers for as long as professors require specific editions for each class (which they are contractually required to do at many universities).
I don't really care what you call it, I just want to be able to buy Sheri S. Tepper's nine "True Game" books for a reasonable price. A "reasonable price", to me, is five to seven dollars per title, with a decent binding. I don't care about cover art.
So far, the "print on demand" systems that do in fact exist do not yet serve my need.
(I actually managed to find books 1-3 by culling Half Price Books for a decade, and somebody ganked my trade paperback of 4-6. I've also got a copy of book 9, but I'd love to have a matching set of the lot.)
No, if you'll look closely, I didn't. I said "Surely you don't think..." means that I assumed you were not making such a silly claim. I invited you to defend your contention. Then you turned into an asshat.
Slashdot Mirror
...or maybe people who praise the iPod are willing to "pay extra for the particular features which the iPod has" and don't give a shit what anybody else thinks.
But I understand how that might contradict your notion that anybody who disagrees with you must be overly susceptible to marketing hype.
"I was under the impression that when it comes to most products, cheapness rules"
Manufacturers like Ferarri, Bang & Olufsen, and Rolex disagree with you. So do their customers. There certainly is a market for the cheapest available object that (allegedly) accomplishes a task. There is also a market for quality products that actually DO accomplish the task (which are often purchased by people who got burned on the first set of objects). And there is also a market for luxury goods, where really top-drawer industrial design is more important than low price.
Like the Dell DJ? Great. Go buy one. If it suits your needs, I think that's dandy.
The rest of your post is just wanking, trying to fit the facts as you (mis)percieve them to your preconceived notion that "success in marketing is the key". You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I happen to think it's bollocks.
Unless this guy compared the two players with the same (good) pair of headphones, I wouldn't believe his "louder and clearer" claims are worth the Internet they're printed on.
Sound quality is HIGHLY subjective, and comparisons based on anything other than controlled double-blind tests are meaningless.
Seems to me like really good UI design is rather a different thing from "style". I mean, I suppose the iPod is stylish (it's WAY more stylish than I am, that's for sure) but good design is way more than "style".
Chickens are totally the way to go, man. Much better juju than ducks.
I wasn't a fan of the touch wheel, until I played with a click wheel iPod mini yesterday.
/will/ be mine.
That is one sweet user interface. Yay new big ass cheap large battery click wheel iPod. She
Next week, when I get paid, that is... : )
I've got a pair of Sennheiser wireless cans. They set me back $200 two years ago, and they are pretty mediocre. They sound pretty good when they deign to lock in to the base station's signal, but they were not worth what I paid for them.
It's hard to imagine Apple would have been able to come up with a substantially bettwer wireless headphone system that fits their style requirement (the Sennheiser cans look like you're weraring earmuffs) without placing themselves into Bang & Olufsen pricing territory.
There are a few pairs of BT headphones just now coming out, but I'm unconvinced that BT has anywhere near the bandwidth for good fidelity. I hope i'm wrong...it's a great idea. But it's not ready yet.
....after you turn around three times widdershins, wave a dead chicken over the machine, and feed all your music through Sony's ATRACk musicfuckerupper.
So, yeah. Minidisc is grand.
not.
Actually, I was referring to my personal end-user decision to install Flash, because it's my bandwidth (by virtue of the fact that I pay for it) and my client resources (because it's my computer). If I were a web admin that didn't like Flash, or a server admin who didn't like Flash, I would be totally free to not use it. However, I'm a happy web user, who thinks that Flash (especially since I've got Adblock installed) is just fine.
The accessibility concerns are certainly valid ones, but since I have the good fortune to have full use of the nominal human sensorium, I am delighted to be able to enjoy me some h*r. : )
If you tell iTunes to keep your music organized, it will TOTALLY NUKE your directory structure and make you a Very Sad Person. It happened to me, and I was really pissed (until I decided I didn't care about the file structure).
iTunes' ID3 tag editing is pretty darn robust, though. Give it a good once over...I vastly prefer it to Tag & Rename for pure ID3 management (although it can do very little with file name and file structure).
And I, too, would love to be able to nuke duplicates. I just blew through a 5000 files by hand in iTunes, getting rid of dupes. Ideally, the app would go through all the audio and ask you "Hey, these two sound the same to me. I'll play one in the R speaker and one int the L, and you tell me if you want me to get rid of one."
Anyhow. Maybe I'll check out encspot and see if it's vaguely useful. What I really want, though, is for musicMobs.com to be able to populate the album art in iTunes. That would be teh roolz.
I'm sorry, I was cross posting from another branch of this discussion.
Foobar is (to my first impression) a really crappy MP3 player whose only virtue seems to be "doesn't take much RAM". I was seriously underwhelmed.
Your iTunes takes a bit more RAM than my iTunes. So I wouldn't call it a "major" RAM hog, and it is certainly worth the bloat IMO.
I am in the final stages of finally acquiring a Powerbook. I've been a Mac geek for a while, but only with Classic OS. I am seriously amped about playing with some nice state-of-the-art Mac hardware with OSX.
Color me gleeful. : ) Come to me, beautiful 12" 1.33 gHz Powerbook of my dreams!
Fair enough. You might note that iTunes can handle all that information in the ID3 tag, and you can use smart playlists (think queries) to suit your listening fancy.
/absolutely everything/ I could ask of it.
So, when I get new music what I do is immediately clear any genre tag that might have been applied by somebody with a different set of sensibilities than I have. I'll listen to it a couple times over a few days, give it a rating (which can be used as a search criterion) and pick a genre. I can also add in the date the album came out (I haven't done this with any consistency at all yet) and, of course, assign track and disc numbers (if necessary).
So, instead of having a big hierarchial table (what if I want ALL the Madonna music, not just her "Pop" stuff?) I have a nice database I can query (Play me all music with an artist including Madonna) or (Play me all music with a genre of "pop" that has a rating of three stars or greater) etc etc etc.
A friend of mine really enjoys his "High School" playlist. He set up a smart playlist that brings back music that came out during his sentence in high school, some of which he knew at the time and some he didn't. It's a good idea, and a difficult one to implement with a filename-based approach.
I don't mean to sound like an evangelist, but I've been looking for a flexible, easy to use way of organizing and querying my music, and iTunes has done
Except take up less memory. Currently, it is only a little less bloated than Firefox. Remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lightweight browser?
All my grocery store loyalty cards are filled out in the name of former Soviet premiers. Unfortunately, I never get any amusingly-addressed junk mail, because I put the address as 123 Kremlin St.
Oh well. Poor Russkies.
Have you tried using iTunes to fix your mp3's? For me, it was a constant struggle with tag & rename and winamp, but it was a cinch in iTunes.
That assumes that there is SOME data in the tag, because if everything's just encoded by filename, I don't think iTunes can parse the filesystem hierarchy.
At first, I was livid that iTunes had flattened my genre\artist\album structure to artist\album, but that just encouraged me to go fix all my genre tags (which wound up being quite easy) and using smart playlists to organize my tunes.
Good luck. : )
I did finally get it to work. That interface needs some ///serious/// work. It's inferior to Winamp's media library, which isn't a patch on iTunes.
I'm glad it works for you, but it doesn't scratch my itch...
Sure. But iTunes still WORKS BETTER. Have you used it at all?
Once I figured out what they were trying to accomplish with that xml database, it was a revelation. I'm serious: That database kicks ass. It makes managing a big music collection FAR simpler.
I did finally get FOobar to work, but the interface is way assy. I'll be glad to give iTunes all the RAM it wants.
If it's my bandwidth, and my client resources, why do you care?
imo flash is a good technology because it enables Homestar Runner to amuse me.
Wow.
I downloaded it to check it out, tried to add all my music, and it completely shit the bed.
Might have a nice low memory footprint, but that doesn't help me if it doesn't work...
Oh well. iTunes it is!
I'll check it out once it can read, write, and not hose the iTunes database. : )
Does it do smart playlists (that is, query-based playlists that I can change on the fly)?
Thanks for the tip. Now, I'm a little curious as to what happens with that memory footprint when I point it at my 4500 song library...
That's a good point. Buying one share of stock in order to receive stockholder data could certainly not be construed as an "investment" (which to my mind is the same as an endorsement of the company's business practices).
So, you're right. There should be a distinction between buying a stock in order to gather intelligence, and making an investment in a company with the expectation of profiting from their unethical behavior.
Save money on textbooks? HAH! What a quaint idea. This will just enable textbook companies to change editions more rapidly, forcing next semester's students to buy the new book, and making your current edition worth a little bit less than the paper it's printed on.
The textbook companies will continue to rape buyers for as long as professors require specific editions for each class (which they are contractually required to do at many universities).
I don't really care what you call it, I just want to be able to buy Sheri S. Tepper's nine "True Game" books for a reasonable price. A "reasonable price", to me, is five to seven dollars per title, with a decent binding. I don't care about cover art.
So far, the "print on demand" systems that do in fact exist do not yet serve my need.
(I actually managed to find books 1-3 by culling Half Price Books for a decade, and somebody ganked my trade paperback of 4-6. I've also got a copy of book 9, but I'd love to have a matching set of the lot.)
No, if you'll look closely, I didn't. I said "Surely you don't think..." means that I assumed you were not making such a silly claim. I invited you to defend your contention. Then you turned into an asshat.
Have a nice day.
That's exactly why I was putting "slaves" in quotes, because I have no information that implies that China has any true slave labor force.
I think you're shouting at the wrong person. I was simply elucidating somebody else's point.
My Palm III is way more durable than the last few hardbound books I've read.
I don't. I only presume MY standard of ethics, and I'll only invest in companies whose ethics are compatible with my own.
From each individuals', what other standard could there possibly be?