Drawing conclusion from the actions of a single individual is not very good research, but draw your own conclusions from this little anecdote.
My boss at work till very recently owned a Nokia N95 – despite all it’s gee whiz features, he primarily used it for two things – phone calls and taking photos of his 1 month old son. I don’t think I ever saw him use the web-browser, GPS or even the music player.
A few months back, he went back home to India for a holiday and his N95 was stolen. His relatives convinced him to pick up an iPhone as a replacement. Overnight, he becomes a geek.
I meant that last sentence. A few weeks in, he starts regularly pulling out his iPhone at lunch to check the Sensex via the Stocks Widget. He would do this despite the fact that he did not have a data plan and was using the Pay-As-You-Go service – which is incredibly expensive!
Next, he asks me how to unlock the phone after he upgraded to the 1.1.3 firmware. I google around and send him a few links, but figure it’s too technical for a non-techie like him. A few weeks later, he shows me his “upgraded” iPhone – not only has he upgraded to 1.1.3 and unlocked his phone, he has scoured the Web for iPhone applications that would unlock the functionality he really wanted – digital zoom in the camera and MMS. But along the way, he had found other applications that were just “neat” – a converter that could use the Web to get up to the minute exchange rates, games that use the accelerometer and a photo editor. He also tells me he’s actively considering getting a data plan, since he’s using the Net so much now.
There are few things that really struck me from watching this transformation:
1. The importance of putting functionality front and center in mobile UI – Looking up things on the Net with the iPhone is one click. Finding the browser on the N95 would involve navigating a menu tree 4 levels deep. It’s no surprise that a lot of people never use the N95 as anything but a phone.
2. The killer app for data on a mobile phone is not a single app – it’s the whole package. If data usage is seamlessly built into the whole OS and offers a compelling benefit to the average user, they will buy in.
3. Not so much a conclusion as a prediction – The iPhone App Store is going to be HUGE – and it’s going to take off much much faster than anyone thinks. My boss is the classic average IT user – comfortable with office productivity applications and basic internet usage and nothing else. Yet, he spent hours searching for applications to get more out of his iPhone. Now he’s told there is a way to easily search and install apps on his phone – with no fear of bricking his phone. I guarantee you he would have pulled out his credit card before you can say “legal iPhone apps” 
. Multiply that by a few million and you can see Apple declaring another monster quarter for revenue and profits.
Recession? What Recession?
So, despite brave statements to the contrary, I’ve been forced to abandon my Creative Zen MP3 player and switch to an iPod. In my defence, I didn’t switch out of frustration with my Zen – I was forced to when it stopped working. A trip to the service center proved fruitless – the only suggestion I got was to maybe trade it in for another player.
Back in the market for a new MP3 Player, I drew up a simple list of requirements:
1. Seamless integration between player and software
2. Good podcast support; and
3. Flash based.
That pretty much meant only one player – the iPod Nano. And so it is that I now have a silver 4GB iPod Nano to keep me occupied on the train ride to and from work. It’s actually been a few months since I bought it, so I thought it appropriate to blog about what I love (and loathe) about it:
What I Love:
1. The integration between iTunes and the player is just fantastic – play counts automatically synchronize; iTunes knows which podcasts you have listened to and in case of partially listened-to podcasts, it even knows how far along you are.
2. Podcast support overall is great – the Podcast directory in the iTunes store; downloading and synchronizing podcasts is built right into iTunes; and the player keeps track of where you left off
3. Design – the player is just gorgeous. Incredibly slim and the flash-based approach means that the battery life is just fantastic.
And… that’s it. That’s all I love about my new iPod. What I loathe on the other hand is quite a bit longer :
What I Loathe:
1. As a music collection management software, the stock iTunes install is incredibly limited. Metadata lookup is simply not accessible if you don’t have an iTunes store account and even then is only accessible if you are going song by song. Media Monkey is leagues ahead of iTunes in this regard.
2. The architecture of iTunes for Windows is terrible – while plugins are supported; the underlying technology is COM, which is ridiculously outdated. The most visible and annoying effects of this decision are
a) each plugin is a separate application and does not integrate into iTunes;
b) iTunes must be running for any plugin to work – even a plugin that aims to clean up the iTunes library!
3. Poor error handling – A lot of my music collection was assembled from old CDs or even floppies (!!) and thus probably have quite a few errors in them. The Creative player handled all these tracks without problems, but the Nano simply choked. In the end I was forced to export my entire collection using Media Monkey as 160 kbps CBR MP3s and then reimport the whole lot into iTunes.
4. Random play within playlists isn’t supported – activating Shuffle means every track on the Nano (including podcasts) is fair game. I really miss this feature from the Creative player, as it allowed me to listen to different artists within a “themed” playlist.
5. Remembering playback positions is highly vulnerable during a sync – Like I said earlier I really love the fact that I can select a podcast and pick up right where I left off. However, if while midway through a podcast, I dock the Nano and the sync happens to involve deleting and adding tracks to the Nano – disaster! Selecting the same podcast after sync will result in the player hanging midway between the track list and the podcast itself. And it will stay that way till the battery drains.
As far as I can tell, this happens because the player is keeping track of the specific position in its memory where the playlist playback stopped and when tracks are added and removed, that position info is basically shot. Understandable, but still annoying.
Overall, I think the lack of functionality in the stock iTunes install (especially for managing music) is what really bugs the most. Not to mention having to run 3 extra applications for each plugin I install to fix some of those deficiencies. Had I not been fortunate enough to already have a clean, properly tagged collection of music, I would have been extremely frustrated by the fact that the much-ballyhooed iTunes offered nothing by way of helping me get my music collection under control.
Since my biggest requirement is for hands-off management of Podcasts, I’m sticking with iTunes for now. But I can’t wait to see the new podcast support in Media Monkey.
A final point on the post about Steve Jobs’s letter to the music industry.
In episode 84 of TWiT, Hahn Choi points one important factor in Apple wanting to keep DRM (especially FairPlay) on the iTunes Music Store. DRM adds lock-in.
As Hahn points out – Since FairPlay is not compatible with any other device on the market; every song you purchase that has FairPlay increases the cost of switching away from that eco-system.
In other words, if you purchased a 100$ worth of music on iTunes and decided tomorrow that you wanted an MP3 player from another company; the real cost of purchasing that new Mp3 player just went up by a 100$.
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In last night’s daily link dump, I had added a link to Steve Jobs’s article wherein he calls on the music industry to give up on DRM.
I applaud the sentiment,but had mentioned that I wasn’t comfortable with how the article dismissed the idea of making opening up FairPlay to other music stores. The argument being that people can’t hold a secret:
“The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak.”
This doesn’t sound quite right to me – if you really really wanted to share but keep the technology a secret, an combination of escrow+black box comes to mind. Place the technology in the hands of a 3rd party; wrap the technology deep inside binary files and create APIs that take unencrypted music at one end and spit out FairPlay’ed AAC files the other.
In any case, I was looking forward to reading more analysis of this article and most importantly, from John Gruber, whose daringfireball.net remains the definitive (and snarky) mac-centric view of technology today for me.
And he delivers very nicely indeed in this article. However, when it came to the part about opening up DRM, Gruber pointed to another article he had written earlier about why DRM and interoperability are mutually exclusive.
Unfortuantely in that article Gruber’s position on why DRM can’t be made interoperable is more finger-pointing than compelling fact. In essence his position is:
- Apple could licence FairPlay to other manufactures, this would put them in a position similar to Microsoft in the PC OS market
- Apple won’t choose to use another DRM such as Playsforsure, because then they would be beholden to Microsoft
- Interoperability exists in standard MP3 files and other non-DRM’ed formats
- But DRM exists in iTunes because without it, the music labels wouldn’t put their music on iTunes.
In other words, it’s not Apple’s fault that iTunes uses FairPlay; it’s the music industry’s fault. And he goes on to say instead of asking for DRM interoperability, remove all DRM.
Nice foreshadowing of Jobs’s letter; but still not good enough. Let’s recap here shall we?
- The music industry wants DRM before it will allow digital downloads
- Apple chose FairPlay for iTunes and the rest is history.
- Microsoft saw the success of iTunes; wanted a piece of it and came with it’s own version of DRM – Playsforsure. Why did they invent a new DRM? The same reason that Gruber gave for Apple not touching Playsforsure. Microsoft wanted no truck with Apple.
- Consumers everywhere get locked into one music store and one music player.
So we know the music industry likes FairPlay but the other player don’t like Apple.Would they bite if it was an independent body – maybe? Could we protect the technology by putting it inside black boxes – possibly. Could it be cracked? – the possibility cannot be ignored. Is there another way – maybe.
Why can’t FairPlay be split into 2 parts? A public DRM “key” available to anyone who was interested and a private “key” available only with the independent body that held FairPlay. Tracks won’t play unless they are signed by the private key held by the independent body, which is validated by the public key embedded in every player. In essence, this is nothing but PKI.
Calling for no DRM is well and good, but if the music industry will not budge without having DRM, it’s time to think about more standardized approaches that will benefit the consumer too. Like Gruber said, the problem is not intractable – but that doesn’t mean there is only one solution.
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