It is hard to argue with Steve Jobs. He made Apple a huge success not once, but twice.
iPod was everything the Newton was not. Yes, I know they are different devices, but iPod achieved simplicity in design and use that Newton never did...it took the Palm to get to that level of simplicity on the PDA front. iPod has won HUGE market share by being a better user experience from soup to nuts...and part of that was the upfront ease of using iTunes for music.
But in the last decade it is open systems that have won the eventual race and iTunes/iPod are anything but open. When the rest of the household audio/visual stack catch up and people can easily move their viewing/listening from device to device, people will have a problem with closed systems. If I own a song/video, why can't I use it on any device I choose? Why should Apple limit me?
Now the iPhone has followed the same closed path...only on cingular, no 3rd party apps allowed, no way to use the included wi-fi to make voice connections...etc.
Just like Apple might have owned the Operating System if it had freed it from having to run on Apple hardware, so might it have reinvented the whole telecom industry if it had enabled the iPhone to openly use all comers, to make phone calls with only a wi-fi connection...imagine.
Someone will go there. It should have been Apple.
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