“The year was 1999. Steve Jobs was on stage at Macworld introducing the latest iMac with Firewire, Quicktime and iMovie. He told the faithful that iMovie was going to be to the Mac what desktop publishing had been 15 years earlier. Internally, the whole company — hardware, software, marketing — was aligned with making Macs the best computers for making home movies,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune.
“Fast forward 14 months and Jobs is on stage telling the faithful he has a new vision for the Mac. It’s called the Digital Hub, and it’s going to start not with movies but with music,” P.E.D. writes. “‘It was a complete change!’ says Ben Thompson, who studied the incident — and interviewed some of the folks involved — as a summer intern at Apple University in 2010.”
“Jobs confessed in 2005 that he was blindsided by Napster and the sudden popularity of digital music downloading. ‘I felt like a dope,’ Jobs told Fortune‘s Brent Schlender. ‘I thought we had missed it,'” P.E.D. writes. “Because Apple didn’t have time to build its own music program, the company bought SoundJam — which was adapted and renamed iTunes. Then Apple made a deal with Toshiba for some tiny hard drives, and the iPod was developed in six months.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
The history of Apple’s iPod – July 26, 2005
