The End of the iPod Is More Evidence That Software is Eating the World
I’m not happy about it either, but it is impossible to stop.
A few weeks back, a very old, very dear friend told me he was annoyed with me. He has heard the iPod was being discontinued and as someone who has spent the last 20 years trumpeting the latest and greatest gadgets, he held me at least partly responsible. Evidently, he is still using an ancient iPod--with a scroll wheel!-to store his music library. “It holds everything, it is perfect,” he explained, dismissing the dead battery and inconvenience of loading the device with a cable and a PC.
Suffice to say; I don’t think he loads much new music.
Of course, the death of the iPod is no surprise. The device was a marvel of its era, but that era has long since passed. Like so many hardware innovations, the core functionality it provided is now simply a feature of a more complex device. Its capabilities are replicated entirely in software, wireless connections, and cloud computing. Software has taken another bite out of hardware--and it is still famished.
The iPod first hit the market in 2001. There were plenty of other “MP3 Players” on the market. I’m pretty sure my first device was a Rio 500 with an incredible 64MB of storage. But the iPod helped Apple build the business that it has today--Halo effect, user lock-in, walled gardens--all of that started with the iPod.
The iPod was a runaway success. Five years later, the iPod was driving Apple’s business. According to MacWorld:
In the first quarter the iPod was available Apple shipped 125,000 units over two months—not bad for a new music device. That quarter Apple also shipped 746,000 Macs and reported a profit of $38 million.
Skip ahead five years to the fiscal fourth-quarter of 2006. Apple reported a profit of $546 million; it shipped 8.7 million iPods and 1.6 million Macs.
And now it is irrelevant.
The phrase “software is eating the world” is credited to Marc Andreeson. This man helped popularize the Web browser before becoming one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. He coined the phrase in 2011, and the last ten years rolled out more or less as he predicted.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services — from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
Indeed, companies spent more than $600B on enterprise software last year, according to Gartner research. The effects for consumers are just as massive. Pause for a moment and consider the other hardware devices that have been made irrelevant by the smartphone:
GPS Devices
Fax Machine
Point-and-Shoot Cameras
Camcorders
White Noise Machines
Scanners
Pay Phones
Smart Home Hubs
Address books
Photo albums
Voice Recorders
Alarm Clocks
Thumb Drives
Ebook Readers
Calculators
There is room to quibble with the list, and I fully expect a response from my buddy when he reads this. (I’m ready for an angry fax.) But the general direction is there. If it can be done in software, it will be. Why carry credit cards when the NFC in your phone is more secure and faster? Why bring a car key fob when your phone can start the car remotely?
The obsolescence of the iPod was an inevitable result of advances in processing power and network connectivity. Technology may be neutral, but it has a direction. The same rules will apply to AI and Automation. As AI entrepreneur Vivienne Ming once told me:
If you're doing the same job today you were doing a week ago, someone like me is going to come along and automate that job.
The future is not built by the sentimental or the nostalgic. I say this as a person that was there when the first iPod launched and still has a collection of vinyl records today. I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but I see what is happening.
There is no going back.
Today’s Bits
Google Knows Where You’ve Been. Should It Tell the Police?
A super important story. I may revisit this in future posts.
At Accenture, 150,000 new hires will spend their first day of work in the metaverse.
Say what you will, Accenture is walking the walk.
How ICE became a $2.8b domestic surveillance agency
If you think they are only looking at illegal and undocumented immigrants, you are very wrong.
Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests.
This would be a killer average for a major league baseball player.
Can we finish solving the coal problem before we move on?