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Your friends in Japan had never seen an iPod in 2005? Apple claimed the iPod had 60 percent of Japanese market share as early as November of that year.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/16japan.html

It kept the lead until September of 2009, when Sony crowed that the Walkman had outsold the iPod the previous week... because the iPod's share had been cannibalized by the iPhone. Nice work, Sony!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

"Better spec'ed" devices that didn't involve a computer necessarily cram more user interface onto a limited surface, which is why almost by definition, those devices were harder to use.

The iPod won not just because its interface was better, but because there was so much less of it. Offloading complex functionality to a general-purpose computing device made the iPod a better music device. There's really no getting around this point, even if the iPod's successors are becoming general-purpose computing devices themselves.

Well they weren't my friends as such just normal non-tech Japanese that I met in various hostels around March 2005. It seemed like it was just getting established at that time, whilst a few had heard of them, the people I had met had never used one. I note that even in the U.K. 2003 very few of my non-tech friends were aware of the iPod still.

The big things at the time in Japan in March 2005 seemed to be the PSP (just released), High Definition TVs (there was one in a shop but were impossible to find in the U.K. at the time) and 100Mbs broadband. Oh yeah and I saw 3D cinema in the World EXPO whilst I was there. Mostly these things are being touted still as new in 2010.

I'd agree that the iPod won because they made a nice device, but I think that's because that is what the American/European markets demand. However there are lots of markets in the world where functionality and price are lot more important than usability, like the massive emerging ones in India and China.

Thinking about this a bit more...

Most of Apple's products are mainstream versions of technology that was available before but not suited to normal consumers.

For example, Personal Computers, MP3 players, Smart Phones and tablet PCs all existed long before Apple made products in those areas.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs don't go to Akihabara every 3 months, and ask themselves how they can make what they see there, but for Americans and Europeans.

I think that's the point. The Japanese are great at making a product better, but not very good at innovating an existing product. They may have made a music player that has the same specs as the iPod years earlier, but they never would have made the mainstream version.

Gah, my blood pressure.

The year is 1978. Microsoft is selling BASIC interpreters. Apple exists in a garage. A Japanese company creates this quirky little tape deck with headphones which -- get this -- you're supposed to actually carry with you, so you can listen to music while not at home. Hilariously stupid idea, right? The Walkman will be lucky to sell a thousand units, to say nothing of crossing over to the mainstream. The Japanese should just stick with what they're good at -- perfecting things made by white people.

Other fun Japanese inventions (culling from Wikipedia):

  The Biplane
  Graphing Calculator
  Solar powered calculator
  Camcorder
  Digital Camera
  Blue lasers
  VCRs
  Anything made by Nintendo
  Flash memory
  Various types of steel
  Quartz wristwatch
  The continuously variable transmission

Yep, nothing innovative or new there.

Um, no.

I think the point is that the Japanese electronics manufacturers were (and are) very good at producing standalone devices, but missed the boat on devices (like the iPod) which get their power from their tight integration with the PC.

The standalone-device model works really well for some applications (e.g. digital cameras; you wouldn't want to have an iPod-style camera that you had to tether to a specific computer to get your photos out -- you want one where you can just swap cards like disks and keep shooting), but less well for others.

Most of the cheap iPod-lookalikes don't have anything like the level of integration that the iPod has with iTunes. And that's what set the iPod apart from the beginning, and has probably been the key to its success.

The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, or even the first hard-disk-based player. But its integration with iTunes, along with the scroll-wheel interface (which was pretty impressive when it first came out), meant that it was the first one many people ever considered buying.

As a sidenote, iTunes did actually work with some other brands of MP3 player early on (including, IIRC, the Nomad), but Apple killed this off pretty quickly once they had their own out there. Which sucked if you owned one of those devices (they learned a valuable lesson for dealing with Apple, and iTunes specifically: beware the feature-stealing "upgrade"), but it's pretty clear why Apple did it.

There have always been MP3 players with better spec sheets as standalone devices, but none really that have anything like the software/hardware (and accessory) ecosystem. They're fine if you want to load music onto the player manually via the file browser, but the whole idea of the (HDD-based) iPod was that it would just contain your entire music library, constantly mirrored from your computer, and you'd never have to do anything.

It's always struck me as an example of how a product that's inferior (or at best "minimum viable") but really well-integrated with software can beat out more feature-rich standalone devices that cut corners on integration.