I headed down the Shenandoah Valley early this afternoon. It was a refreshing change. This morning I was in Alexandria. After that I stopped by Tyson's Corner to buy some LL Bean sweatshirts for the winter. After I left Bean's, I stopped by the Apple Store. I was more interested in seeing the new computers, than the video iPod. That put me in the minority as most of the customers were looking at iPods. I was surprised at how crowded the Tyson's parking lot was. I guess the shopping frenzy is about to begin in earnest.
The iPod looks to be a must have holiday present this season. I'm still a little surprised at the whole iPod mania. The video iPod mystifies me even more. I once was in a meeting with one of Apple's product managers when he said that "customers don't know what they want, we have to tell them what to buy."
That pretty well sums up our consumer society. We have the best and brightest in our society coming up with ideas for products which at some point become must have items for us. Some solve real problems and some don't. The original iPod and the iTunes Music Store allowed us to buy individual songs instead of whole albums. It made it incredibly easy to do. It gave people more control over their music collections. It became a hit.
Now we have the video iPod. You can watch television that you missed for a fee or I'm told, purchase music videos. It may well be something that helps Apple sell a predicted total of 37 million iPods in 2005. That's an amazing number of something that didn't even exist a few years ago. I'm probably not going to be a customer for this video device which allows me to view what I wouldn't watch anyway.
It's interesting that we have some very serious problems we need to solve, such as energy independence, remaining competitive in a global economy and providing health care for our population. We can create video iPods, but we can't seem to make much progress on these real challenges. We're pretty good at coming up with the next great thing without which our lives are incomplete. It's a whole lot harder making our lives work towards a better society.
Someone told me that he thought the video iPod would be the greatest product of this century. I certainly hope not. Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley if he wanted to spend his life selling sugared water or make a difference in the world. I wonder how many steps up the evolutionary ladder it is from sugared water to video iPods? In the iPod world do people still have conversations with each other? Maybe it won't matter, people can just download videos of their friends talking.
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