Why iTunes won: it was obvious six years ago

Yet another digital music service has ceased to exist today, even as the iTunes Store continues to rake in a progressively larger chunk of overall music sales. Why is it that Apple has been the only substantially successful company in the history of digital music, while most other companies (large and small) who’ve tried have failed miserably? It might be part of the overall trend of Apple designing its products for the least-geeky 99% of the population while all the other consumer tech companies are designing theirs with the geekiest 1% in mind, but that’s another story for another day.

Digging through Beatweek’s earliest archives from early 2004, I came across this fairly arrogant missive I wrote more than six years ago about why iTunes had already won the digital music downloads war, and more specifically, why Microsoft had no real chance:

Microsoft is incapable of writing quality software, so the product will undoubtedly be terrible. Microsoft only succeeds when it can attain a monopoly in given market, and iTunes already has a lock on that. Hewlett-Packard has already inked up an exclusive deal with iTunes. Microsoft will be the only download service that can’t realistically abandon the Windows Media Audio format. The next version of Windows, which would presumably have Microsoft’s service bundled with it, won’t be out for another three years, by which time the game will largely be over.

I say “arrogant” in hindsight because it was more than a little presumptive to claim to know that a company with limitless resources was guaranteed to flop in its efforts. But then again, it was kind of obvious when you look back at it, wasn’t it?