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The Leaning Tower of Ping: How iTunes Could Be Apple’s Undoing

5 points by robertbud1 16y ago

demallien 16y ago
OK, firstly a nitpick - feature creep is not the same thing as cruft as Stephenson describes it. Cruft is specifically about the code, and how under the hood everything gets very messy. Feature creep (to continue the car metaphor) is more like having a very busy dashboard. Secondly, the reason that iTunes has become this kind of catchall application is because Windows users do not like installing new software on their computers. Just about everyone has iTunes installed, so when Apple wants to add new functionality to the computer part of it's vertically integrated stack, it is easier to get users to adopt the software by inserting it into an already existing program than it is to get users to install a new program. In turn, it is easier for users as well - instead of having a myriad of different applications to manage on their computer, they only have one. This of course doesn't apply to Mac users, where Apple can push updates to as many apps as they want in a synchronised manner. Thirdly, as anyone that uses Apple products knows, it is often possible to simplify a product so that the 90% use case is very simple, but at the expense of making the 10% use more difficult/impossible. No, I don't have to worry about how iTunes stores my files, the app does it for me, but if I'm a power user and I want to install my music library on a separate hard drive, or set it up to be shared between multiple computers, all of a sudden it's not so easy to use any more. That said, iTunes is easy to critique on this score - why all of those different views of your media, for starters. Or at least, I can understand your book collection looking different from the TV show colleaction, which looks different to the film collection, which in turn looks different to the music collection, but why allow the user to choose which view they want for which media type - this is a most un-Apple like way to do thigngs, and they really should think about cleaning out some of this extraneous stuff, to once again simplify the interface.

5 points by robertbud1 16y ago

OK, firstly a nitpick - feature creep is not the same thing as cruft as Stephenson describes it. Cruft is specifically about the code, and how under the hood everything gets very messy. Feature creep (to continue the car metaphor) is more like having a very busy dashboard. Secondly, the reason that iTunes has become this kind of catchall application is because Windows users do not like installing new software on their computers. Just about everyone has iTunes installed, so when Apple wants to add new functionality to the computer part of it's vertically integrated stack, it is easier to get users to adopt the software by inserting it into an already existing program than it is to get users to install a new program. In turn, it is easier for users as well - instead of having a myriad of different applications to manage on their computer, they only have one. This of course doesn't apply to Mac users, where Apple can push updates to as many apps as they want in a synchronised manner. Thirdly, as anyone that uses Apple products knows, it is often possible to simplify a product so that the 90% use case is very simple, but at the expense of making the 10% use more difficult/impossible. No, I don't have to worry about how iTunes stores my files, the app does it for me, but if I'm a power user and I want to install my music library on a separate hard drive, or set it up to be shared between multiple computers, all of a sudden it's not so easy to use any more. That said, iTunes is easy to critique on this score - why all of those different views of your media, for starters. Or at least, I can understand your book collection looking different from the TV show colleaction, which looks different to the film collection, which in turn looks different to the music collection, but why allow the user to choose which view they want for which media type - this is a most un-Apple like way to do thigngs, and they really should think about cleaning out some of this extraneous stuff, to once again simplify the interface.