Mentions personal use of Overcast.

Transcript context

…All right, I’ve got one more and that one is this rising tide lifts all the ships concept where if any of the listeners are familiar with like the indie Mac ecosystem, there’s this concept of getting Sherlocked where Apple introduced Search, sort of Sherlock the feature and that was a third-party utility before, and when it got built into the platform that “we’re very sorry, thank you for the idea, thank you for building our platform, we’ve destroyed you.” And there are times where that is terrible and there are other times where they do a bare bones implementation on the platform level and it gets better for everyone. An example of that, I mentioned Marco Arment before that he built Instapaper before doing Overcast and with Instapaper, Apple came out with Safari reading list that was baked into the operating system into the browser. And that actually raised awareness of the category of the concept that you could save things to read later and was good for Instapaper. And it’s interesting to think about how sometimes that’s the case but sometimes it kills you and in this case, Audion guys were hoping, well, maybe Apple did sort of a barebones thing here and for pro sophisticated users, they can find out about music management through Apple and then come and buy our software. And that totally didn’t happen. iTunes was too full featured, number one; it was free and it was bundled into the platform. And it’s something where it’s I’ve always thought before, well, maybe people freak out too much when a platform launches a thing and they should think more about the Instapaper strategy of how can you create something that the platform by their nature, by needing to serve a wide variety of people aren’t going to serve the narrow band, like how can you thrive in that narrow band. But you really need some serious pro features and serious narrow band differentiation in order to make your thing worth paying for when it’s competing with free and baked into the platform. Oh man, this is such a great lead-in into my biggest tech theme I wanted to discuss. But I'm wondering thinking about this, how much this has to do with Steve Jobs. Like when you think about, I mean, Sherlocking was happening in the Steve Jobs era and certainly iTunes-ing which absolutely killed Audion, as they wrote about in the blog post. Steve was write and he told them to their face that when he was launching iTunes, he was like, “Yup, we’re going to steamroll you guys. Like you should throw your lot in with us. ” And he was right. And then it’s later kind of in the tail end of Steve’s tenure and then after Steve with stuff like podcasts, you know, talking about Marco and the Apple default native podcast app, but I use Overcast now that Marco makes and so many other people, and it’s the indie software that’s so much better or like with Maps. You know, when Apple launched Maps and it was like, oh, you know, are they going to kick Google. And like no, best thing that ever happened to Google Maps on iOS was Apple launching Maps. I wonder if it’s really that both the focus that Steve had on really, well, on (A) doing individual apps right and having a ton of focus on them. Having them (B) key parts of his overall vision. I mean, his vision for the digital music revolution and making Apple relevant again wasn’t just iTunes. It was fitting into a whole piece of ecosystem that he was building. And Apple has really not done well on that since Steve. Yeah, that's interesting. iTunes is relatively deep. Like they’re not taking a broad, shallow approach. They took a full featured approach, and that full featured approach resonated with everyone. Like they did this amazing job of making it deep without being complex and part of that is the praise of the UI design, but another part of that is the fact that maybe Steve kind of was the every man in his interest where when he decided “This is a passion of mine and music is a passion of mine, and we’re going to go deep into music and be a music company,” that actually was something that just did resonate with tons and tons and tons of people, and that he was kind of like a symbol for the every man.…

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