Why I am not an iPod fan?

Wow. I know I am gonna ruffle quite a few Apple fans by writing this particular blog post. So before I get started, let me post a disclaimer which says - "I am not a Microsoft fan boy, nor do I specifically hate Apple or any of its products (iPod/Mac/iPhone included)". "I also believe that Steve Jobs is truly an inspiring person, and though I don't sit late into the night to party, I have always followed his keynotes live in WWDC and Mac World live whatever time of the night it is!".

However ever other subject that I study (Strategy/Technology/Marketing/Branding) in MBA somehow touches on the fact that Apple is a great company and they are good at everything that they do. How iPod/iPhone was a revolution and how everything about Apple is so cool. And then the class discussion is generally led by the Apple fans who go gaga over the amazing Mac OSX and how everything "just works" right out of the box. And we always conclude that iPod was the most amazing thing that happened to mankind after the discovery of the wheel.

My opinion is that, most of the iPod users out there are just ignorant of the fact that there are other digital media players available in the market, and also we generally tend to buy things that our friends have already bought (and do not experiment with new stuff). This behaviour which I think is rightly described by Scott Adams as "Moist robots".

As for things working right out of the box, I never had issues with my laptops and desktops (PCs) and they all to worked out of the box. (Yeah, the desktops I assembled, but the processors and Mobo and RAM just worked out of the box you see :) !!).

The worst part out of all this is, if Apple does commit a blunder tomorrow, the analysts and people will start bashing it and then suddenly what Apple does would suddenly become "so wrong". I always feel that Yahoo! and Palm do not deserve all the bashing that is meted out to them today. Same is the case with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. We like to make ordinary people and companies Demigods and then all of a sudden one fine day we start hating them to the bone! And then we blame the media for all the pain and gore in this world when in reality it is we the consumers who really like things that are sensationalized :) !! So in the end my opinion is Apple is just another good company trying to maximise shareholder value and personifying it into this massive benevolent organization out to change all that is bad in this world is simply wrong!

Before I end this blog post, I thought I show you all this clever advertisement made for the Blackberry Storm which somehow never saw the light of the day. Nice one...