iPod's Lessons

Ironically during the week that we were closing this issue featuring our annual "Success Stories" coverage, the July 26 issue of Newsweek arrived, featuring one of the most successful products introduced in the past decade, iPod.

Forget the over-the-top front page headline ("iPod, therefore i Am") or the breathy, nine-page celebrity-type treatment iPod, Apple and founder Steve Jobs received. (The coverage should be critiqued by the Columbia Journalism Review.)

If you can make your way through the fawning prose, the feature does make valid points:

• Apple saw that the first digital music players were lousy;
• Apple realized that and took the business by storm with a sleek, user-friendly design;
• Apple followed it up with plenty of new iPods that were Mac- and Windows-friendly and could store more music;
• iPod has become so popular it is now a fashion statement, and any other digital music player is considered "Brand X" for many consumers;
• iPod is now synonymous with the digital music players in consumers' minds, as much as Walkman was vs. portable cassette players 20 years ago, or as Newsweek puts it, "To the delight of Apple (and the chagrin of Sony)."

Well Sony, and the rest of the consumer electronics industry, should be chagrined ... and give credit to Jobs and his team at Apple for coming up with an easy-to-use and fun item that has become the latest product everyone wants.

This should be a wake-up call to everyone selling technology to consumers. Convergence is a two-way street. With digital technology the computer industry has moved into the consumer electronics market. Historically the difference between products designed by the two industries for the same consumer was that CE products were user-friendly, while PC products were far from that.

The iPod experience should be a lesson to all. Namely, while you may design almost-miracle products that enable consumers to entertain, educate and communicate with each other, if you don't make the products user-friendly, well-designed and fun to use, you'll be stuck with plenty of inventory and only impress your fellow engineers.

Now about our "Success Stories." If you look at each product profiled, all of them are well-designed, relatively easy-to-use and bring something relatively new and different to the marketplace. (And they helped retailers make a buck or two, which isn't bad either.) While many of them won't get the "iPod treatment" from some national news magazine, they are great examples of the best of the electronics, computer and major appliance industries.

TWICE applauds all of the manufacturers whose products were profiled in our coverage, along with all of the other "Top Ten" items in each category. And we thank our friends over at The NPD Group of Port Washington, N.Y. who for the third straight year generously provided us with their dollar sales statistics.