

The Leaning Tower of Ping: How iTunes Could Be Apple’s Undoing - robertbud1
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/09/03/the-leaning-tower-of-ping-how-itunes-could-be-apples-undoing/

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demallien
OK, firstly a nitpick - feature creep is not the same thing as cruft as
Stephenson describes it. Cruft is specifically about the code, and how under
the hood everything gets very messy. Feature creep (to continue the car
metaphor) is more like having a very busy dashboard.

Secondly, the reason that iTunes has become this kind of catchall application
is because Windows users do not like installing new software on their
computers. Just about everyone has iTunes installed, so when Apple wants to
add new functionality to the computer part of it's vertically integrated
stack, it is easier to get users to adopt the software by inserting it into an
already existing program than it is to get users to install a new program. In
turn, it is easier for users as well - instead of having a myriad of different
applications to manage on their computer, they only have one. This of course
doesn't apply to Mac users, where Apple can push updates to as many apps as
they want in a synchronised manner.

Thirdly, as anyone that uses Apple products knows, it is often possible to
simplify a product so that the 90% use case is very simple, but at the expense
of making the 10% use more difficult/impossible. No, I don't have to worry
about how iTunes stores my files, the app does it for me, but if I'm a power
user and I want to install my music library on a separate hard drive, or set
it up to be shared between multiple computers, all of a sudden it's not so
easy to use any more. That said, iTunes is easy to critique on this score -
why all of those different views of your media, for starters. Or at least, I
can understand your book collection looking different from the TV show
colleaction, which looks different to the film collection, which in turn looks
different to the music collection, but why allow the user to choose which view
they want for which media type - this is a most un-Apple like way to do
thigngs, and they really should think about cleaning out some of this
extraneous stuff, to once again simplify the interface.

