Steve Jobs

whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.” Evangelist was dumbfounded, but it led to the simplicity of what became iDVD. Jobs even helped design the “Burn” button icon.
    Jobs knew digital photography was also about to explode, so Apple developed ways to make the computer the hub of your photos. But for the first year at least, he took his eye off one really big opportunity. HP and a few others were producing a drive that burned music CDs, but Jobs decreed that Apple should focus on video rather than music. In addition, his angry insistence that the iMac get rid of its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it could not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray format. “We kind of missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to catch up real fast.”
    The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.
    iTunes
    It didn’t take Jobs long to realize that music was going to be huge. By 2000 people were ripping music onto their computers from CDs, or downloading it from file-sharing services such as Napster, and burning playlists onto their own blank disks. That year the number of blank CDs sold in the United States was 320 million. There were only 281 million people in the country. That meant some people were
really
into burning CDs, and Apple wasn’t catering to them. “I felt like a dope,” he told
Fortune.
“I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
    Jobs added a CD burner to the iMac, but that wasn’t enough. His goal was to make it simple to transfer music from a CD, manage it on your computer, and then burn playlists. Other companies were alreadymaking music-management applications, but they were clunky and complex. One of Jobs’s talents was spotting markets that were filled with second-rate products. He looked at the music apps that were available—including Real Jukebox, Windows Media Player, and one that HP was including with its CD burner—and came to a conclusion: “They were so complicated that only a genius could figure out half of their features.”
    That is when Bill Kincaid came in. A former Apple software engineer, he was driving to a track in Willows, California, to race his Formula Ford sports car while (a bit incongruously) listening to National Public Radio. He heard a report about a portable music player called the Rio that played a digital song format called MP3. He perked up when the reporter said something like, “Don’t get excited, Mac users, because it won’t work with Macs.” Kincaid said to himself, “Ha! I can fix that!”
    To help him write a Rio manager for the Mac, he called his friends Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller, also former Apple software engineers. Their product, known as SoundJam, offered Mac users an interface for the Rio and software for managing the songs on their computer. In July 2000, when Jobs was pushing his team to come up with music-management software, Apple swooped in and bought SoundJam, bringing its founders back into the Apple fold. (All three stayed with the company, and Robbin continued to run the music software development team for the next decade. Jobs considered Robbin so valuable he once allowed a
Time
reporter to meet him only after extracting the promise that the reporter would not print his last name.)
    Jobs personally worked with them to transform SoundJam into an Apple product. It was laden with all sorts of features, and consequently a lot of complex screens. Jobs pushed them to make it simpler and more fun. Instead of an interface that made you specify whether you were searching for an artist, song, or album, Jobs insisted on a simple box where you could type in anything you wanted. From iMovie the team adopted the sleek brushed-metal look and also a name. They dubbed it iTunes.
    Jobs unveiled iTunes at the January 2001 Macworld as part of the digital hub strategy. It would be free to all Mac users, he announced.“Join the music revolution with iTunes, and make your music devices ten times more valuable,” he concluded to great applause. As his advertising slogan would later put it:
Rip. Mix. Burn.
    That afternoon Jobs happened to be meeting with John Markoff of