Lazycoder

iPod and the end-to-end experience

Remember that the biggest part of the end-to-end experience is in the middle (duh).

People might be buying the WMA compatible players, then taking them home and having to spend 2 hours trying to find the right driver, then after they find the right driver and get the software they find it’s easier to manually copy over the files themselves rather than use the software or the software crashes a lot (I’ve had that problem with MusicMatch). Then maybe sometimes the drive just disappears 1/2 way through the file copy and they have to unplug it and plug it back in before their PC recognizes it again. Then the realize that the headphones that came with their player are cheap and hurt their ears after a little while so they have to spend more money to buy new headphones (which headphones do they buy “hint, they’re white”). Some might realize that the radio built into them is really cheap and can’t pick up the stations they want to listen to so they end up buying a small radio to sit on their desk at work.

These same people see their friends plug their iPod/mini/shuffle into their computer, hit “autofill” in iTunes, and happily go on their way. Suddenly, they aren’t so smug after that and they start to think “I want it to be that easy. I want it to just f****ing work”. Not all of the WMA players out there are JFW certified where the iPods, at least when coupled with Apple PCs are.(my friend is having a hell of a time getting his iPod synced with his iTunes after uninstalling a 3rd party sync app he was using. It’s looking like a combination of a Windows XP SP2 problem and an iTunes problem.)

Secondly, if all of these other players are soooo much better than the iPod shuffle why is it I never heard about them from all of the WMA pundits until the iPod shuffle was announced? “hint, they aren’t so good”. Scoble is right, marketing is key. The party I hear about is the one I’m going to, not the one I don’t hear about.

Third do a search for “< $100" and "512 MB" at playsforsure.com and let me know what the results look like. "hint, they're blank.". Apple has hit a key price point and can say things like "Well I guess you need the radio so you can listen to some music because the other players only give you 1/2 as much music for the same price". Who needs a radio if I've got twice as many songs? $200 bucks for a gig in the WMA camp? hell for $50 more dollars I can get 4 times as much storage in an iPod mini.