I used to own a Creative Zen music player. It was great. It was black and shiny, with a touch pad control and a bright, vivid screen, and it played all my music. There were two things in particular I liked about it:
1. I could transfer music to and from it using the standard file system on my PC. Once connected to my computer, I just copied MP3 files (or pretty much any other format) across, and it loaded them into its library.
2. The music it played sounded fantastic.
I was very happy with my Zen. But sadly, I lost it. I was at a gig at Brixton Academy, and my friend persuaded me to accompany her down to the front, to the mosh pit. I can't remember what band was playing, but the front was a rather lively place to be, and sure enough, when the gig was over I was not only bruised and covered in beer, but also missing one music player (and without my phone, which I later discovered had been used to make four hours of calls that night to Algeria).
So, I bought another one, second-hand, from the internet.
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the lovely Zen:Vision (to be honest, the touch pad took a bit of getting used to, and it was about four inches thick) |
Around the same time, though, the company where I work treated all its staff to £300 of vouchers for the Apple store as a reward for hitting a revenue target. No sooner had my replacement Creative Zen arrived in the mail than I found myself inside the local Apple store, purchasing an iPod Touch.
My first reaction to owning an iPod Touch was "ooooh, shiny". My second was "shit, how am I going to get all my music onto it?" And my third, on listening to some tunes after transferring an album or two, was "Jesus, the sound quality is nowhere near as good as that on the Creative."
I googled and found that yes, there was a consensus view among those who had used both the Apple and Creative products that the sound emerging from an iPod - any model, not just the Touch - was distinctly inferior to that from the Zen.
It turned out that no-one really cared.
Unless you'd used an alternative, it wasn't obvious how tinny and mediocre the sound from an iPod was. 99% of iPod users were blissfully unaware that what they were listening to would actually sound considerably better on another device. Interestingly, the Zen was launched around the same time as the iPod Video (the first iPod that could play movies), so a lot of the reviews focused more on screen resolution and quality of video playback than music performance; and here again, the majority opinion was that the Zen was better.
That wasn't what the game was all about. Apple won the day on design and usability. It always seemed strange to me that a device whose main purpose was to play music wasn't actually very good at it; but I guess that was a valuable lesson. Make it simple, make it desirable, make it just work... and then your users will overlook:
- the crappy sound
- the proprietary interfaces and leads
- the non-universal file format
- the range of ridiculously expensive knitted accessories (OK, so that's not a biggie but really, those 'socks'...)
and of course...
- the appalling bloody software you HAVE to use to get music on and off the thing
She is not a technophile. She only uses her computer to store music and check her hotmail - and has NO CLUE what else it can do. For years, she actually sent all the new CDs she bought with her iPod to a friend by post, who would load the tracks onto the iPod for her and send it back by mail.
The new laptop was, therefore, something of a trial for her. She'd downloaded iTunes already, which was a start. But now she was telling me that she couldn't just plug her iPod into the new computer because it would wipe all her music from the device.
"I'm sure it won't" I said, trying to disguise the tone of condescension in my voice. "Connect it up and you can just synch it to the library on your new install of iTunes."
"No. It doesn't work like that," she insisted. "If I did that, it would synch with the empty library and delete all my music. I know. I've done that before."
"Whaaaaaat?! That can't be true."
But it was.
No doubt Apple experts could explain why this was of course the desired behaviour and a sensible thing to do, and point out that my friend should have done x, y or z when setting up her new computer. All I can offer as a riposte is that This Would Not Have Happened With the Creative.
It took my friend the next three weeks to load all her music back into iTunes. (She owns a lot of CDs). Yes, she's not particularly techno-literate - she has a habit of losing all the channels on her telly by pressing the wrong button on the remote and then waiting two months until I visit to fix it - and no doubt she could have avoided the situation she found herself in. But I remember thinking at the time that, for all their user-friendly, slick and marvellous technology, Apple had managed to force my friend to stay in her flat for the best part of a month loading CDs into her computer.
Of course, once I bought my own iPod, I could experience all the joys of iTunes for myself. Almost every music track I own now lives in two places on my PC - where I'd originally ripped it to from the disk, and where Apple stored its own files when I imported it using iTunes. Suffice it to say that I think it's bloated from years of feature creep, and long overdue for a radical redesign. I haven't even updated my version for the last three years because every time the reminder window pops up advising me of a newer version, I look at the size of the download and sigh....
So, yes, this is just my own personal, subjective experience of Apple, and yours may -and probably does - vary. (And I haven't even got to what really tipped me over the edge yet, my anti-Apple apotheosis - I've saved that for part 3).
Coincidentally, Channel 4 news this evening had a report on Microsoft versus Apple. An industry expert attempted to explain why Apple's share price had shot up 80% in the same period that Microsoft's had risen by only 2%, despite the fact that MS is still more profitable.
The gist of his analysis was that Microsoft have great technology but they haven't been able to market that technology anywhere near as successfully as Apple. I gave a wry smile at this, because it put me in mind of yesterday's blog post. The piece concluded with some shameless PR puffery; a few folksy Redmond employees showed the lucky journalist round their colossal R&D division and let him play with a bunch of super cool prototype tech that looked like it had all been built immediately after the dev team had had a pizza night watching Minority Report. Kinect bowling - "developed right here, in this very facility" - looked a bit shit, though.
Maybe Microsoft are waking up to smell the (fancier, Jobs-blend) coffee. They're opening a pilot "Microsoft store" in Seattle in the same mall as the Apple Store, to show off their own new breed of sexy gadgets. It looks identical to the Apple Store, complete with robotically cheerful assistant in branded t-shirt welcoming every customer through the door.
But "Microsoft Store" just sounds wrong, doesn't it? You can't steal the success of your competitor by stealing the layout of his shop. It smacks a little of desperation. If I buy a guitar and a wig, that still doesn't make me Jimi Hendrix...
On the advice of a very kind commenter on the blog yesterday, I watched Simon Sinek's TED talk. Among other things, Sinek attempts to explain why Apple are such a great company. It was very interesting. His conclusion is something deceptively simple to explain:
People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
In his view, Apple starts where most companies end, with an answer to the question: "why are we doing this?" For Apple, the why is to be a company that challenges the status quo. How they do that is by designing great products.... and the what, which is where most other organisations would start, is that they just happen to make computers. And music players. And phones...
Sinek claims that people buy Apple products because they can sense a company that shares their own beliefs. Apple appeals to the part of their brain, the limbic system, that controls decision making. So, Apple products just "feel" right because Apple as an organization embodies something that its customers also hold to be true about themselves. Sinek summarizes this as follows:
"Sell to people who believe what you believe."
Perhaps that's why the idea of a Microsoft store sounds so incongruous. What do they as an organisation believe in that can rival Apple's core (no pun intended) motivation to always challenge the status quo? Microsoft just sell computer stuff. Apple encourage a form of tribal loyalty among its customers because they have a gut feeling that Apple feels the same way about things as they do. It's not exactly scientific, but that's his proposition. Buying Apple products is a very personal statement about who you are, whereas buying Microsoft is a more rational, less instinctive thing.
Hmm. Maybe. Maybe it's not just the branding and Jobs's black polo necks. Maybe it's the experience of using something and thinking "wow, that did exactly what I thought it should do; that's how I would have done it; it matched my way of thinking precisely" and consequently forming a powerful affiliation with that company. It's not just that we like stuff that's easy to use, goes the argument; we get warm deep-rooted fuzzies towards organizations that make the stuff that's easy for us to use.
But, for me, it's all gone wrong. I'm on the outside looking in. I'm peering through the restaurant window at the romantic couple eating their oysters by candlelight. I'm Michael York in Logan's Run who starts to doubt the very concept of Renewal. I've left the dome.
In the next part, I describe the moment when I finally fell out of love with Apple, and how it's all the fault of one man whose name I can't even remember.
"Sell to people who believe what you believe"
ReplyDeleteI can't help but feel Apple's strategy is more along the lines of:
"Make people believe something. Then sell it to them"