As a contraexample, I've always held that Steve giving up on the "no iTunes for Windows" decision saved the sales trajectory of the iPod, which paved the way for the iPhone/iPad.
And the App Store as well, Steve thought it would be best to do deals n an app by app basis. However note that in both cases he did relent. For all the stories about his intransigence he didn’t hire yes men and he did listen to the people he trusted.
Do we know that to be true? It seemed to me like they pulled the public SDK and App Store together much faster than they could have if it were a last minute change of direction.
And it further seemed to me that had Apple let developers write apps from day one, the quality of apps would have been far worse, with many developers basing their iPhone apps on the designs and logic flows of their existing Blackberry/Windows CE apps.
Looking back on it, I think they did—whether by design or by accident—exactly what they should have done.
It wasn't a last minute change of direction, they had about a year to put the DK and app store together. I believe the final decision was made shortly after SDC in 2007.
They couldn't have released an SDK in 2007 though, it simply didn't exist every system app was essentially put together by hand as part of the system and debugged and tested alongside the OS. At least that's what it sounds like from the interviews I've seen with developers on the project.
Indeed. iTunes (for Windows) used to be so great, fast, clean, easy to use it immediately replaced WinAmp which we all used to use. It wasn’t just that it was the only software to support the iPod, in fact you could sync WinAmp to the iPod as well, there was no closed ecosystem yet, it was that iTunes was just better. Natively written for Windows, imported cds and organized metadata. Once they switched to HTML based and started pushing movies, it became awful.
Windows iTunes was never really intended to be a music player, I don't think. It was intended to be a Windows beachhead for "enough macOS" to talk to any and all consumer-electronics hardware Apple was producing.
This meant that, from the start, Apple knew that as they did more and more varied consumer-electronics plays, Windows iTunes would necessarily bloat into the monster it is today.
I don't know about all that. There's plenty of software out there that is much more complex and isn't as bloated. Granted multimedia software can get pretty 'heavy' but still. I feel like iTunes for Windows is very low priority and fewer resources are allocated towards it which I find a bit sad, I used to use iTunes for years and now I rather just listen to music off my phone or from a browser from Google All Music Access.
Although even my Google Play Music app seems to have some annoying bugs lately that are starting to irritate me, like if I download songs for offline listening and I'm connected to the internet it still redownloads the song. Or how it always winds up failing to download albums for offline listening despite it streaming just fine at the same time.
I mean I thought we solved playing audio files ages ago, most people listen to pretty standard audio files so I'm surprised we dont have snappier apps to listen to music with. I can totally see an Electron app emerging that gives a better experience than iTunes, which is embarrassing given how many resources have been allocated to iTunes as a whole.
Why? I've had to spend time to set up a separate laptop with Windows 10 just for iTunes for my wife's mobile.
I get that iTunes is horrible, unintuitive software. (Where's Apple's famed user-centricity? This looks like really developer-centred software. To get to actual information about backups one has to know that there is seemingly only one way of doing so which is to click the small icon of an iPhone in one particular place.) But it's a pain to have to use some insecure second-class operating system just to access it. (I have neither the money nor the interest in setting a MacOS machine just for iTunes.)
Did he simply relent to someone else's pleadings? Or did he see something to change his mind, e.g. a demo of the Windows Carbon shim library proving was possible to bring the macOS aesthetics and features to a Windows iTunes?
"He didn’t want to make a Windows version of the iPod and iTunes; when all of his lieutenants fought him on it, he eventually conceded they were right, though grudgingly: “Screw it. I’m sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.”