Buying In - (Page 69) buying in 69 Well, I said defensively, there are people who do just that. “Of course they do.” I felt his annoyance shift elsewhere. “And it’s like . . . somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool. It’s painful to watch. You know what I mean?” He looked at me for a while, and started to think he was trying to tell me something. Then he said, “It’s like . . . watching Michael Dell try to dance.” The PR minder guffawed. “Painful,” Jobs summarized. Jobs had heard the predictions that history would repeat, and his innovative device would end up a niche product, and he had no patience for any of it. And indeed, the Dell MP3 player and any number of others that have come and gone since 2001 have hardly dented the iPod’s dominance. In fact, its share of the MP3 player market has actually grown—from about 60 percent in 2003 to 75 percent in 2006. “We don’t underestimate people,” Jobs told me. “We really did believe that people would want something this good, that they’d see the value in it. And that rather than making a far inferior product for hundred dollars less, we’re giving people the product that they want and that will serve them for years, even though it’s a little pricier People are smart; they figure these things out.” The point that companies like Dell—may have no great reputation as innovators but have a track record of winning by playing a price-driven, low-margin volume game was dismissed. “For whatever reason,” he said with finality, “the superior product has the largest share. Sometimes the best product does win. This may be one of those times.” Maybe so. But I departed Cupertino with a distinct sense that I had not isolated the precise nature of the iPod’s bestness—let alone figured out why it had cracked the Desire Code of disparate millions of consumers. I had talked to the people
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