Steve Jobs

do!” Jobs kept insisting when Marsalis’s attention would wander. “See how the interface works.” Marsalis later recalled, “I don’t care much about computers, and kept telling him so, but he goes on for two hours. He was a man possessed. After a while, I started looking at him and not the computer, because I was so fascinated with his passion.”
    Jobs unveiled the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. With hair now closely cropped and receding, and a studied unshaven look, Jobs paced the stage and described how Napster “demonstrated that the Internet was made for music delivery.” Its offspring, such as Kazaa, he said, offered songs for free. How do you compete with that? To answer that question, he began by describing the downsides of using these free services. The downloads were unreliable and the quality was often bad. “A lot of these songs are encoded by seven-year-olds, and they don’t do a great job.” In addition, there wereno previews or album art. Then he added, “Worst of all it’s stealing. It’s best not to mess with karma.”
    Why had these piracy sites proliferated, then? Because, Jobs said, there was no alternative. The subscription services, such as Pressplay and MusicNet, “treat you like a criminal,” he said, showing a slide of an inmate in striped prison garb. Then a slide of Bob Dylan came on the screen. “People want to own the music they love.”
    After a lot of negotiating with the record companies, he said, “they were willing to do something with us to change the world.” The iTunes Store would start with 200,000 tracks, and it would grow each day. By using the store, he said, you can own your songs, burn them on CDs, be assured of the download quality, get a preview of a song before you download it, and use it with your iMovies and iDVDs to “make the soundtrack of your life.” The price? Just 99 cents, he said, less than a third of what a Starbucks latte cost. Why was it worth it? Because to get the right song from Kazaa took about fifteen minutes, rather than a minute. By spending an hour of your time to save about four dollars, he calculated, “you’re working for under the minimum wage!” And one more thing . . . “With iTunes, it’s not stealing anymore. It’s good karma.”
    Clapping the loudest for that line were the heads of the record labels in the front row, including Doug Morris sitting next to Jimmy Iovine, in his usual baseball cap, and the whole crowd from Warner Music. Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a million songs in six months. Instead the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six
days.
“This will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry,” Jobs declared.
    Microsoft
    “We were smoked.”
    That was the blunt email sent to four colleagues by Jim Allchin, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows development, at 5 p.m. the day he saw the iTunes Store. It had only one other line: “How did they get the music companies to go along?”
    Later that evening a reply came from David Cole, who was running Microsoft’s online business group. “When Apple brings this to Windows (I assume they won’t make the mistake of not bringing it to Windows), we will really be smoked.” He said that the Windows team needed “to bring this kind of solution to market,” adding, “That will require focus and goal alignment around an
end-to-end service
which delivers direct user value, something we don’t have today.” Even though Microsoft had its own Internet service (MSN), it was not used to providing end-to-end service the way Apple was.
    Bill Gates himself weighed in at 10:46 that night. His subject line, “Apple’s Jobs again,” indicated his frustration. “Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things,” he said. He too expressed surprise that Jobs had been able to convince the music companies to go along with his store. “This is very strange to me. The music companies’ own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user. Somehow they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty good.”
    Gates also found it strange that no one else had created a service that allowed people to buy songs rather than subscribe on a monthly basis. “I am not saying this strangeness means we messed up—at least if we did, so