It’s the Software, Stupid

With the impending launch of the iPhone in the US sometime next month prepare yourself for two things. First, prepare for the inevitable slew of articles from journalists attributing the success of the device to the multi-touch screen and its otherwise breakthrough design. Second, get ready for the similarly inevitable slew of challengers that will line-up against the iPhone claiming to be the next king of portable multimedia devices. What do both things have in common? How about that they’re both horribly wrong.

I know this is all coming because this is what comes whenever Apple launches a new iPod. Which is not to say that I’m not looking forward to the release. I enjoy in-depth profiles of Jonathan Ive (no, really) and I confess to delighting in the schadenfreude of watching Microsoft fail with the Zune. What I am getting tired of is both journalists and rivals continually missing the point – it’s not the look of the iPod (or the iPhone) that is the root of its success, it’s iTunes. Despite all that’s been written about the iPod since its debut in 2001 I’ve seen precious little attention devoted to the software that sits between your computer and the iPod. This amazes me because for almost anyone but the most die-hard geeks without iTunes your iPod would be useless.

Yes, for all that’s been written about the thickness and the weight and the click wheel and the anodised aluminium and the back-light and the lack of rivets and the texture and the clicking noise and the size of the hard drive and the colour of the headphones – all of it – all of it means squat. It’s nice to be sure but the iPod isn’t successful because it has white headphones. When it entered the market that wasn’t the gap it aimed to fill. What if filled was the every-piece-of-software-that-interacts-with-an-mp3–player-is-shit gap. I say ‘gap’ but really it was more of a yawning chasm because seemingly in spite of themselves no portable device manufacturer had cottoned on to the fact that driving the blunt end of a spoon up your nose was more fun than using any one of their programs.

Case in point, king of portable music in the 80s and 90s, Sony. Before I purchased an iPod last year I had owned a PSP and before that a Mini-Disc player. And while I profess admiration for both devices, try as I might I couldn’t be happy with their software packages. For those that haven’t experienced the joy that was Sony’s OpenMG Jukebox consider yourself lucky. OpenMG Jukebox was much like chlamydia: a fair number of people probably had it but no one wanted to talk about it in public.

It really shouldn’t have been that difficult to copy music to a Mini-Disc (which were essentially just CDs). And yet it was. Oh so very, very, very difficult. I think my favourite aspect of the OpenMG was the way in which it not only transcoded every MP3 I had into Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 format before transferring it to the Mini-Disc but secretly stored a copy of each file in a directory deep, deep within my Documents and Settings folder. In other words not only was transferring music laborious but it slowly ate up space on my hard drive! Brilliant!

The PSP’s music management software as a minor improvement over the Mini-Disc’s but only because it didn’t exist. Oh, yes, at some point they made it work with SonicStage (their successor to OpenMG Jukebox) but it certainly felt like more of an afterthought than anything else, as if someone sitting around one day had realised ‘Shit, does this work with SonicStage?’ and then hastily dispatched some poor sod to slap something together.

While the music management was non-existent the PSP promised much more than just that. It played back video, too. Unfortunately Sony’s method for transferring video onto the PSP was Image Converter 2.0. A program that was designed for the CLIE handheld and that cost you an additional US$20. Image Converter seems to have disappeared from the Sony Style store so I can only assume Sony now figures we’ll just work out our own way of putting video on the PSP. Or that maybe we’ll buy some of those UMD videos that sold so well.

Now I don’t think what I wanted to do was particularly amazing. I had my music in MP3 format on my computer. I could connect both my Mini-Disc and my PSP to the computer via USB. All I wanted was a one-button process that would transfer content easily between these two devices. Why was that so difficult? Why, after at least five years, was there still not a solution for this? Why do you think Sony ceded their crown to Apple?

In comparison to this mess my first experience with iTunes was a delight. The worst thing I could say about it initially was that it was a resource hog but I say that as the type of person that underclocks their PC and then tries to run Outlook, Firefox, Google Talk and uTorrent at the same time. Occasionally I load up EditPlus, Lightroom, Reader, Photoshop or Word just for fun. iTunes made navigating my music easy. Scrolling through my library was nice but it was iTunes’ smart playlists that really impressed me. Smart playlists took advantage of the way in which iTunes viewed your music as a collection of songs rather than as a collection of files and folders as most other programs at the time did. It was easy to create playlists of my most played songs, the songs I hadn’t heard in a long time and so on. Of course smart playlists were only as good as your metadata and it was metadata that truly ensnared me.

Name, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Grouping, My Rating, Play Count, Last Played, Date Added… that was real genius. I ended up buying an iPod because I was frustrated that the information I was building up in iTunes was all but useless to my PSP. There were some tools that tried to connect the two but they ran a poor second to the iPod and iTunes. And metadata locked you into iTunes. By almost always showing you all the data regardless of whether it was empty or not iTunes practically invited you to while away a lazy Sunday afternoon filling it all in. And once you’d spent that time cataloguing you sure as hell weren’t going to use any program that didn’t import that across. Even if you didn’t fill it all in, things like play count and last played updated themselves automatically. Eventually Apple made it so that their software even downloaded album art for you.

I remember when I first used Windows Media Player 11. Initially I was impressed by the metadata it imported. There was all my album art not to mention all the song data: name, artist, album, year, genre… — wait, my ratings. My track count. My last played. I had entire playlists built around those attributes. Where were they? Gone. My hours of painstakingly rating my music reduced to 3 stars for everything. For everything? Why not at least set it to nothing as iTunes does? It didn’t take long for me to give up on Media Player 11.

But when you stop and think about it it’s almost inexcusable that the data wasn’t brought across. After all, it’s not as if this data is hidden. iTunes stores its data in an easily accessible XML file for God’s sake! You can open it with a Notepad. It should not be beyond the engineers in Redmond, or indeed Tokyo, Singapore or Taiwan, to easily import this data into their program. I need this data to be there if you want me to use your program.

And indeed that’s now become the problem. There are people out there who are tied to iTunes. And being tied to iTunes invariably means being tied to the iPod. If you want to defeat the iPod you really need to defeat iTunes. It’s that easy. OK, I lie. It’s not easy. It’s never easy to defeat the incumbent and it’s even more difficult when the incumbent is doing a pretty good job meeting customer expectations. Does your music management program have a Cover Flow-like feature? No? Then it’s shit. Can your music management program manage podcasts? No? Shit. Does it sync on connect? Shit. Rip CDs at full speed? Shit. How about smart playlists? …come on, guys, we’ve had those since version three.

If you’re out there and you’re making music software what you have to realise is that iTunes is the standard. So many people use it that if you want to defeat it your program must at least do everything it can do. It needs to be as fast, as easy and as pretty. At the very least. Really, it should be better. If I’m going to switch I need some sort of incentive.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to conquer it. In some ways I’m reminded of the situation Firefox found itself in when it debuted against Internet Explorer. How did Firefox fight back? The first thing it did was to do everything IE did. When you first ran it, it imported all your Internet Explorer settings with a click of a button. Within minutes you were up and away and it was as if nothing had changed. On top of that, though, Firefox added incentives to switch. It was more secure. It was extensible. It was standards-compliant. It rendered PNGs properly! (OK, so maybe only a few of us really care about that one.) Internet Explorer did have one great weakness that iTunes doesn’t yet have. Active development on it had stopped. Microsoft has kicked things back into gear now with Internet Explorer 7 but Apple has never even given anyone else that kind of chance. Despite the sheer dominance of Apple in the MP3 player market it hasn’t made the same mistake that Microsoft did with the browser. This puts its competitors in a difficult position.

There is an alternative to developing an iTunes-killer, of course: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Make your product work with iTunes. I can tell you now that if my PSP had interfaced directly with iTunes its unlikely I would have gone out and purchased an iPod. There are a few products that will work with iTunes but it’s painful. And when you’re competing with the iPod you can’t afford to have anything be painful. Of course, this is unattractive to companies such as Microsoft and Sony because they want you to shop on their online stores (which are tied to their proprietary players). Perhaps it’s time to realise how ridiculous this is, though? How much music is purchased through the Sony Connect store? I’m guessing somewhere between ‘fuck’ and ‘-all’ with it being a similar story over at the Zune Marketplace. Still, what’s Creative’s excuse?

Well we’ll see how things go this time around, I guess. June is almost here and Apple undoubtedly has more iPods ready for the coming holiday season and Microsoft hasn’t burnt through that giant pile of money Bill Gates goes to sleep atop. Still, if you’re out there trying to craft an iPod-killer and you don’t understand why it’s not working taking the market by storm despite your best marketing efforts consider trying to develop an iTunes-killer. Maybe that’s the secret sauce you need.