Let There Be iPods!

Subcontracting and related concerns like supply-chain control and outsourcing are ubiquitous features of the globalized economy, no less with our era's quintessential product, the iPod, than with IT services or magazine writing. Leander Keaney's excellent article on the origins of the iPod describes how the device was thought up outside Apple, then quickly brought into the company for development and, of course, sale. The organizational arrangements are fascinating to me, as a historian of business, but as an iPod user, the bits about how Steve Jobs literally and figuratively shaped the iPod are also interesting:

"They'd have meetings and Steve would be horribly offended he couldn't get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button," Knauss said. "We'd get orders: 'Steve doesn't think it's loud enough, the sharps aren't sharp enough, or the menu's not coming up fast enough.' Every day there were comments from Steve saying where it needed to be."

Knauss said Jobs' influence was sometimes idiosyncratic. For example, the iPod is louder than most MP3 players because Jobs is partly deaf, he said. "They drove the sound up so he could hear it," Knauss said.

In twenty years, somebody's going to write a great book on the iPod. (I'm now accepting fellowships for that project...)