I wonder if the timing (iPod a year earlier than iTunes Music Store) wasn't just one of the kind of things that happen when you manage huge things - in that case two huge things. Usually, no matter how much you consult and plan, a huge project has a good chance of not being quite the same as the vision, not ending with quite the planned cost, and possibly finished on a different date than planned.
No. The iPod is a hardware device which mainly required manufacturing. Setting up the iTunes Store required
tons of legal negotiations with dozens of record labels (and different nations with differing laws). At its release, the iPod was just a portable player for iTunes users (who had presumably ripped their existing CD collection onto their HDs).
With the iPod and iTunes the perfect result would have been a simultaneous release and, for all we know, that's what Apple wanted. However, they had much more control over the deadlines for the iPod than they would have had for iTunes (negotiations with third parties for content) and so the latter was forced to later.
No again. "iTunes" was an
already-existing piece of software (
SoundJam) which Apple simply grabbed up and changed the name. Sure, the iPod was probably a glimmer in Steve's eye at the time... but, there was no need for some simultaneous release of both iTunes and the iPod. In fact, many threads i've seen echo the sentiment that "too much too soon" is often a formula for failure. [else, maybe i'd be typing this message on a NeXT workstation.]
