Might 12, 2005: Longtime Apple frenemy Invoice Gates tells a German newspaper that Apple could have hit it huge with the iPod, however that its success isn’t going to final perpetually.
The rationale? Cell phones are going to steal the iPod’s market share. The excellent news for Gates is that he was proper on the cash. The unhealthy information for Microsoft is that Apple cannibalized itself by making the iPhone. And Apple’s smartphone turned much more profitable than the iPod.
Invoice Gates: Apple can’t maintain iPod success
“Nearly as good as Apple could also be, I don’t imagine the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long term,” Gates instructed the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “You may make parallels with computer systems: Apple was very robust on this discipline earlier than, with its Macintosh and its graphics consumer interface — just like the iPod at present — after which misplaced its place.”
Gates went on to foretell how issues would play out. Cellphones, able to doing a lot of what an iPod might do, would destroy the marketplace for MP3 gamers, he mentioned.
On the time, the Apple press considered Gates’ dismissive feedback in regards to the iPod as bitter grapes from a person who — having stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000 — was now not related within the tech world in the best way Steve Jobs was.
Sony offered 340 million Walkmans over 25 years, pundits famous. Since Cupertino had offered simply 15 million iPods on the time, most observers remained assured that Apple’s transportable music participant would take pleasure in an extended, profitable future. And it did: Apple offered some model of the transformative music gadget for greater than twenty years, solely pulling the plug on the iPod on Might 10, 2022.
(For extra on the iPod’s revolutionary function inside twenty first century tradition, learn Cult of Mac’s particular report: An illustrated historical past of the iPod and its huge affect.)
Cellphones are the brand new MP3 gamers
At this time, nevertheless, we all know that Jobs agreed with Gates. The yr earlier than, at a time when gross sales of the iPod made up roughly 45% of Apple’s income, he struck a cope with Motorola to provide a cellphone that might play songs from iTunes.
That cellphone wound up changing into the immensely disappointing Rokr E1, the grandfather of the iPhone and the primary Apple-sanctioned cellphone to run iTunes. It was a bust, but it surely pushed Apple to enter the smartphone market — which it did two years later with the iPhone.
Nonetheless, regardless of Gates’ prophetic phrases, Microsoft didn’t take the iPhone too severely, both. Watching this traditional Steve Ballmer clip makes clear how badly Microsoft misjudged Apple’s cellphone:
Yeah. Who would ever need a smartphone with out a bodily keyboard?
