| Tuesday, December 28, 2004 |
11:30 - One who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom
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I know I should probably just be leaving well enough alone, but—why do you suppose it is that Glenn says that iTunes is "still not an Amazon.com for online music"?
I'm sure he can't mean the iTMS is missing features that Amazon has. What's lacking, anymore? Gift certificates? Recommendations? Reviews? Account management and history? Linkable pages? From my perspective as a shamelessly biased corporate shill, I think it's all there, or at least everything that's relevant. It even has stuff I'm not aware Amazon has, like allowances. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean Amazon.com is a better store for online music; they've got that "Music Downloads" section, but there's not much in it but artists who don't mind publishing free MP3s. It's just not the same kind of store at all.
Is it just a matter of selection? It's true that many omissions are curious, though Apple has been diligently adding new music at a very steady clip ever since opening the store; there are some bands that I doubt will ever appear there *cough*Beatles*cough*, but the other holes are being steadily plugged. I remember someone saying upon the iTMS's opening that it would not gain credibility as a retail avenue until it had a million songs in its library. Well, haven't they passed that mark by now? They certainly seem to have achieved some measure of credibility.
I suspect that the interface of iTunes is really key here. I don't know that people would put up with even a totally full-featured and usable music store if the music-browsing interface itself were mediocre. Remember when iTunes for Windows first came out? It was a revelation to many. And deservedly so: iTunes is a stunner of an app, revolutionizing the world of interface design even in the eyes of those who represented the vanguard of the industry's then-best practices. Everyone on the Mac side has been coding to the iTunes standard since it came out—it was like a flash of sudden enlightenment that filled everyone with a renewed desire to create great new software that could benefit from the new unifying simplicity of the iTunes metaphor.
On the surface, the slickness of iTunes is simply its one-window approach, its eschewing of the here-useless hierarchical "tree" view, and the stabbing insight that what we're dealing with here are not MP3 files, but songs. Songs aren't organized by "filename" and "folder", but by album and artist and genre. And that's only the beginning of the list of criteria by which to sort one's music. Other organizers of data have given us huge amounts of meta-data before, including Windows XP; but nothing until iTunes had had the audacity to hide the files/folders metaphor entirely and abstract the entire interface into the best-suited criteria for organizing a particular form of media. The real leap of genius in iTunes is to use an adjunct database that separates the music layer from the files layer; this creates an abstraction that's potentially prone to breakage and strikes purists as inelegant, but it's a leap that made a whole world of new features possible. It took many people a good while to figure out what iTunes was trying to do (particularly those used to Windows and apps like WinAmp): create a music interface, not just a front-end to files and folders, not just a suited-up filesystem interface with extra bells and whistles. Once people understood this, everything fell into place: it was just so obvious.
iPhoto attempted to follow suit along the same philosophical lines, organizing photos not by filenames and folders but by film rolls and by their actual visual appearance, using resizable thumbnails to help organize. This effort has been less successful than iTunes, whose media is seemingly perfectly suited for the abstracted media interface metaphor. Photos work a little less well; they're a bit more unwieldy. Movies, when the time comes, will work less well still. But iTunes remains on top of the heap, a gold standard so inspirational that everyone wants to make their software work as well as it does, even if its content doesn't lend itself to iTunes-style organization.
But iTunes wasn't done changing people's outlook on software yet. Soon came new features like "Smart Playlists", which leveraged the queryability of the music database to allow the user to set up saved queries for particular classes of music, on whatever combinations of criteria they liked, which would always remain up-to-date—"80s Music", or "Never Listened", or "Classic Rock", all defined on things like ranges of release dates, the user's "star" rating, the play count, groupings of multiple genres, and so on. It's limited only by the user's imagination, and packaged into a metaphor like "playlists", it turns SQL into an Everyman's tool, making one's music collection sing and dance like collectors of vinyl or CDs could only have envisioned in sci-fi fever dreams. And it's this new functionality—the saved query—that's going to shortly revolutionize everyone's computing all over again. Mac OS X Tiger will include an iTunes-style database (Spotlight) that gives not just your files in the filesystem, but any app that wants it, the same data-organizing functionality that iTunes has. Tiger's Mail has "Smart Mailboxes", whose usefulness is obvious to anyone who's used a Smart Playlist. "Smart Groups" enhance Address Book. And in the Finder, "Smart Folders", stealing thunder from Microsoft's Longhorn (which for a long time has been aiming to do the same thing), free your very files from their folder-based strictures and let you group them according to your query-driven whims. We're already seeing various attempts to leap onto this new bandwagon barreling down on us—Google Desktop seems to want to provide a stop-gap before Longhorn gets here, and Thunderbird has its own Smart Mailboxes-workalike functionality—but Apple will get here with the biggest and earliest comprehensive solution. And it's all thanks to the iTunes revolution.
Now, with all this insight exhibited so blindingly by iTunes, you'd think that there would be a host of imitators by now. But what ones there are are pale, halfhearted simulacra, desperately seeking some angle that Apple has missed, and grievously wounding the simplicity of the concept in the very attempt. You can't improve on iTunes by adding hierarchical playlists, for example—the metaphor doesn't make sense. That's why Apple didn't put them in in the first place. All they do is clutter up the interface and make it less compellingly usable, for negligible benefit. "Skins" or "Faces" also don't help; iTunes' interface was deliberately chosen to be attractive but austere, eschewing the chaotic car-stereo-looking layouts of so many competitors that end up looking like nothing so much as elaborate spyware. Skins make the user focus on the interface, when the whole purpose of iTunes is to make the interface so natural that it blends into the background and becomes invisible. Very few voices today bemoan the lack of skinnability in iTunes.
After a time, one gets the feeling that the competitors are dealing in Cargo Cult Software—they're merely imitating the surface elements that they believe make iTunes successful, but without understanding the philosophy that lies underneath it. Without that understanding, it's yet possible to make a fine, usable iTunes clone; but you're not going to make any leaps of further insight, following from the design ideals that informed the software's original creation, that bring it to the next level or create the Next Big Thing. All the minds put together that created WinPlosion couldn't have come up with Exposé in the first place. That took Apple.
Mac users have been used to Apple software for many years; and with a number of notable exceptions (Apple's user-experience commitment waxes and wanes in regular cycles, I'm told by those on the inside), they've demonstrated a continuous thread of philosophy under all the software they create: a philosophy that software development is not about the software at all. It's about the people who use it, and getting them in direct contact with the media they're working with. The best software that exemplifies this ideal is the software that fades into the woodwork and becomes transparent, letting the user roll up his sleeves and work with the data without ever thinking about the tools he's working with. (Having all apps look and work like all other apps is a big part of this.) True, some Apple software loses track of this vision; some of it is annoyingly obtrusive, or inexplicably rebellious in its look and feel. But there's still that common thread running through it all: the continuous inspiration of a company full of people who "get it", whose final product is a small subset of their grander vision, not just a point-for-point Cargo Cult imitation of something they've seen elsewhere. Just as Terry Brooks couldn't ever seem to conceive of any idea he hadn't already read in Tolkien, the latter man took a much grander world to his grave than he had ever revealed to any earthly ears.
That's the kind of thing Apple's got going. Windows users have been given a glimpse of it with iTunes, and a good number of them have absorbed what it means to have an entire platform where everything works that well. There's just a different style behind the creation of Apple software, something ineffable that can't be quantified, and that nobody else has the chops to challenge. It's why I think it would be such a shame for Apple to disappear, unlikely though such an event might seem nowadays (boy, how far we've come in the last three years, eh?). Other companies might take Apple's place as the guardians of their various pieces of the multimedia pie; someone else might outdo iTunes, or someone else might make a better iMovie, or someone else might remake Mac OS X. But nobody can claim such a long-lasting legacy of commitment to a consistent software design philosophy as Apple can; nobody else's name is synonymous with "ease of use" dating back to the 1970s; nobody else fully knows the extent of Apple's vision, or would be willing to sacrifice market share (as Apple has) for the sake of sticking to that vision and its attendant ideals. Another Apple might rise... but it would be a mere shadow of the one we've known, the goose who continues to give us golden eggs as long as we don't demand to know how. For all our artifice we can't construct another once that goose is dead.
We'll give Glenn a couple of weeks. Then he'll be hooked for good. Heh.
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Brian Tiemann
