Can’t Hurt — Part 2
Yesterday in Can’t Hurt — Part 1, we talked about how and why iTunes was so revolutionary.
Today, we’ll cover how it turned into one big mess and how hopefully you can prevent that from happening with your products.
I do quickly wanna mention that in order to prevent turning a great product into crap, one must first HAVE a product that is in fact great.
The way you can tell your product is truly great is by answering this binary question:
‘’Are people beating down our door to get their hands on our product.’’
Any answer short of an emphatic yes is, in fact, a no.
So if that’s not the case yet, then don’t sweat today’s essay so much.
Alright, let’s get into it.
iTunes sold 1 million music downloads in its first week despite only being available for Mac users (for the first 5 months).
After it launched on Windows as well it quickly turned into a monopoly product for digital music sales.
But as it grew in popularity, so did demand for certain features. Which Apple gladly provided, resulting in a product that became increasingly bloated over time.
A process known as feature creep.
What started as a solution to a simple problem: buy and play digital music became increasingly cumbersome as they started adding more features.
iPod management, podcasting capability, a video and software marketplace, iPhone backup + management, a complete social network, and their own music streaming service.
When the iPhone launched, many people had hoped that Apple would create some kind of standalone app in order to sync all your data.
Instead, Apple jammed that functionality into iTunes, creating a world of hurt ranging from iTunes not syncing correctly, error messages and crashing feature art and other metadata.
But fortunately, they learned from their mistake so when iPad launched in 2010 they were quick to…
do exactly the same.
On top of iTunes doing everything I already mentioned it was also in charge of syncing your purchased movies, music and tv shows, your free and paid apps, your podcasts, your lectures (iTunes U), your eBooks, your photos and contacts, your calendar events and much more.
But, in for a penny in for a pound, so Apple decided to go full on bloat mode and introduce their answer to the hype train that was social networks at the time, called Ping.
It was supposed to be a music-oriented social network meant to help users share and discover music.
But it was full of spam content and links.
Steve Jobs marketed it in the presentation as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes”, which was kinda funny since they didn’t have (or get) a working Facebook integration.
Tim Cook quietly axed Ping in 2012 saying:
“We tried Ping and the customer voted and said, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into. Some customers love it, but there’s not a huge number that do, so will we kill it? I don’t know. I’ll look at it.”’
Launched with such hype in 2010 only to be quietly put down 2 years later.
But in 2012 users finally got their standalone app to sync all their iGadgetry called iCloud.
A good thing! But iTunes wouldn’t be iTunes if it weren’t gonna fuck it up somehow.
You see.. at the same time, the launched iTunes Match (which later become iCloud Music Library).
The idea was that it would scan a user’s entire music library and match the songs to a higher quality that they could buy in the iTunes store. Then it would upload all those songs to iCloud so the user could listen to it from any device.
That was the plan at least… but instead, users complained that it screwed up their metadata, deleted or overwrote album art, played different songs than the ones you clicked, put songs in the wrong order in albums and put random songs in albums where they didn’t belong.
Which meant that many people who already were … let’s say, slightly less enthusiastic about iTunes, now became fully pissed the fuck off. Having spent hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars on iTunes music only to have their library completely rendered useless.
In Can’t Hurt — Part 1, we talked about jobs. How a company has a job and it fills that position with an employee who can do that job, and how a user has a job but hires a product to do that.
Apples revolutionized the way we consumed music by making it even more convenient than piracy. But after a decade the next revolution would come from a different company.
Daniel Ek’s Spotify.
As Spotify grew in popularity, iTunes music sales quickly began to decline.
Apple realized that it’s better to disrupt yourself when someone is already doing it to you so they launched Apple music.
Users speculated whether it would be integrated in iTunes or released as a standalone app.
Fortunately by now, Apple had learned all the lessons (yes all of them) from the iTunes fiasco and so they wisely decided to…
cram more shit into iTunes.
Needless to say, users were NOT thrilled about the Apple Music integration with iTunes.
And to make matters worse, users couldn’t even use all functionality because things like downloading tracks (for offline playback) required iCould Music to be turned on which, as we just discussed, was like playing Russian roulette with your music library.
On top of that, it was slow and cumbersome due to all the bloat which was yet another reason to drive users into the arms of the competition.
The purpose of Can’t Hurt was to illustrate what can go wrong if you continually add features and how important it is to have one’s ear to the ground.
An individual donut doesn’t make you fat but it can set a precedent for poor habits which in turn make you fat over time.
Your closet didn’t become filled with clothes you never wear overnight.
Your house didn’t become messy because of a single dirty glass.
And yet in a way it did.
Because it’s that 1 poor decision that dominoed into 2, 4, 8 and eventually it just ran away.
This is why I think minimalism, having an attitude of getting rid of things by default and keeping what you want vs. keeping things by default and getting rid of what you want, is so beneficial.
So when in doubt about building out your products, be careful about adding things ‘‘because it can’t hurt’’, cuz it just might.
Originally published at www.younglingfeynman.com.
