There's no shortage of stories celebrating the iPod's 5th birthday but the CNNMoney story makes clear the contribution to Apple.
"Apple (up $0.43 to $79.42, Charts) shares, which traded around $9 five years ago, have risen nearly nine-fold since then.
iPod sales are still growing - shipments rose to 8.73 million in the latest quarter, up 35 percent from a year earlier- even though there's some serious competition out there now for the world's most popular digital music player."
PC World has an interesting piece proposing 5 lessons the iPod teaches:
1. Simply put, entertainment needs to be simple.
2. DRM (digital rights management) should be damn near transparent.
3. The best revolutions are the ones that don't ask people to reinvent all their existing habits.
4. Small is reliably beautiful.
5. Technological races are never, ever over.
and ends making wise observations about:
"So I'm not even going to hazard a guess in this blog post about what the market will look like five years from now--except to say that a smart company with cool products could still enter the field today and do to the iPod what it did to everything that proceeded it."
and offers a link, (courtesy of YouTube a less than 2 year old company sold to Google for $1.65b), to the video of Steve Jobs announcing the iPod October 23, 2001.
All this on a day when IBM files patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon.com for a host of violations including:
"1. US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.
2. US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive Network.
3. US 7,072,849 - Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service.
4. US 5,446,891 - Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities.
5. US 5,319,542 - Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue."
Noteworthy is these patents date as far back as 1984, to IBM's investment in PRODIGY the pioneering online consumer service. In the IBM press release Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president of IBM Technology and Intellectual Property states:
"IBM is one of the world's leading creators of intellectual property and one of the most progressive in embracing new, highly collaborative ways of driving and managing innovation. Everything we do is premised on the fundamental principle that IBM's intellectual property is one of our core assets, and represents the work product of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and billions of dollars of investment."
The press release also states:
"IBM holds more than 40,000 patents worldwide and has been awarded the most U.S. patents for 13 consecutive years."
A further reminder on the iPod's 5th birthday of the value and importance of innovation.
~ Jenny Ambrozek
