| Monday, October 20, 2003 |
17:28 - I'd call that getting off to a good start
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/10/20/1926204.shtml?tid=107&tid=141&tid=187&tid=1
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Slashdot is reporting that the iTunes Music Store has sold a million songs since its Windows release 3.5 days ago.
ajkst1 writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store has sold 1 million songs since its release on the Windows platform on October 16. Also of note is the 1 million downloads of the iTunes music program itself. When the iTMS was first released, it took a full week to sell a million songs. The store has now had 14 million songs purchased and downloaded since its original launch in April."
Nice.
So far the buzz seems to be plenty positive. We've got stalwarts like Penny Arcade and other gaming-oriented sites singing iTunes' praises, and I'm hearing from many Windows-using friends that-- once they get past a few of iTunes' idiosyncrasies-- they're falling helplessly for it.
Some of those idiosyncrasies, it should be pointed out, are not necessarily failings of iTunes-- just culture clash. It's true that many users are having trouble with bugs or infrastructural issues; there's the aforementioned person who had problems getting track listings from the CDDB (which pretty neatly monkey-wrenched the works from then on out, killing any chances of a good first impression), and I had an e-mail from one person who said iTunes was totally useless because it didn't play Ogg Vorbis files (for God's sake). But aside from that, it seems that the biggest problems people are having with it are simply related to how iTunes does its thing. It's working as designed-- it's just the design that people are having trouble getting used to.
And it's not that the design is unnecessarily kooky or anything. It's quite the opposite. As one co-worker tells me, iTunes unnerves people purely because of how simple it is. "How do I rip songs from a CD?" one asked. "Well, see that 'Import' button in the top right?" "Yeah..." "Click it."
"Yeah? And then...?"
"Nothing. That's it."
Apparently a lot of Windows users are honestly finding that that level of intuitiveness is... well, counterintuitive. And that's what's really going to prove to be interesting in the coming weeks and months-- this is the first opportunity we have to see what happens when the Apple software style makes its inroads into the Windows market. We'll see how much resistance it meets, and how much it shakes things up.
Said co-worker said that he believes quite sincerely that iTunes is going to cause a major tectonic shift in how apps are designed on Windows. Apparently it really is that different from what the Windows tradition has made of its native software. I don't know how much credence I give his hypothesis-- I'll believe it when I see it-- but he thinks Windows app developers are going to look at iTunes and seriously, seriously rethink their approach toward UI design. "They'll have to," he says. "There's nothing out there like this. This software could not have come out of the Windows development world."
I suppose there's something to be said for a clash of expectations. From what I've seen of Windows music-management applications, there's been something of an arms race, a relentless push to make things look cooler and more hackery and more dark and mysterious. Yellow text on black backgrounds. Swooshy metallic visual effects. Tiny little letters in blocky technocratic fonts. After looking at things like the AudioGalaxy music player and WMP, it does indeed seem very unlikely that there could be a player from within those ranks who would have the eye-dacity to bring out an application with a spare, conservative appearance, with smooth black letters on a well-padded white and light-blue background, with the major color palette being brushed-metal and beige and blue. How gay!
And that's to say nothing of making features like CD burning simple enough that they require you to do nothing more than click a single button and insert a disc. Or share music from another computer by doing nothing but turning your computer on. Sure, these features look an awful lot like having the hood welded on; but after some examination it just turns out that the access panels are just neatly hidden. Pop one open and you can construct Smart Playlists based on complex database queries into the Library. Pop open another and you can convert between ID3 tag versions or join tracks for large-scale imports. All these features are implemented and exposed in the order of their usefulness; the more esoteric functions are hidden away, and the commonplace ones are out in plain sight, with lots of unused space that in a Windows app would be crammed to the last pixel with control buttons. It's to the point where a user can spend an hour poring through the menus looking for a feature like "Rip CDDA to WAV", when the "Import" button is staring him in the face.
I don't know what this means for the future of Windows software. Maybe it does mean there's a sea change coming, where Windows software will start to be designed according to what provides the most functionality for the least hassle, instead of which app offers more checkbox items and a more techno-hip interface than the next guy's. From a selfish Mac-snob's perspective, that's bad news-- it means less incentive to buy a Mac. But given that the goal is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things, without having to feel afraid of their own tools... well, I can hardly consider this to be a bad development in the scheme of things.
Let the good times roll!
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Brian Tiemann
