Blogs

Next Monday, Oct. 23, marks the fifth anniversary of the iPod. Newsweek's Steven Levy chats with Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the modest topic of "the past, present and future of the device that changed Apple -- and the world."

It makes for fascinating, and fun, reading. For example, Jobs offers this explanation for why the iPod succeeded where other hard drive-based music players failed: "One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless."

He also explains just how he managed to get all the major record labels to sign on to the iTunes Store -- "we made a series of predictions that a lot of things they were trying would fail. Then they went and tried them, and they all failed, for the reasons that we had predicted." -- and makes a pointed rebuttal to criticisms of the iPod's lack of interoperability:

Do you think that it's fair to the customer that the songs they buy from Apple will only work on iTunes and the iPod?

Well, they knew that all along.

At one point you were saying, "When our customers demand it, that's when we'll consider interoperability."

Nobody's ever demanded it. People know up front that when they buy music from the iTunes music store it plays on iPods, and so we're not trying to hide anything there.