XplanaZine

Transcript

I’ve always been pretty bad when it comes to adopting fads, although I should point out that it’s not because I haven’t tried or didn’t want to.

When I was I kid, my brothers and I always wanted the latest thing but my parent, sweet Depression-influenced people that they were, never felt that it was appropriate to waste hard-earned money on things like, Ker-Knockers, mood rings, lava lamps, sea monkeys, pet rocks or pop guns. As we always used to say, what a drag.

So, the reality is that I always got to experience fads second hand when I was growing up, through the kids on my block or at school.

Which isn’t to say I don’t know one when I see it. A fad is something you don’t bet your vacation money on or that you buy without having a backup plan. Fads are temporal and temperamental. They’re big and brief. Bottom line — it’s a fad if, when you buy it, you’re aware of the fun and the futility of the purchase.

Which is what surprised me this last week when Dell’s President, Kevin Rollins, said that Apple’s iPod was a fad. I find that downright funny. Looking at all of the things I just listed, the iPod doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. It’s already been around for four years, a whole lot longer than any particular PC model pushed by Dell and certainly longer than pet rocks. In the interview, Rollins mentions the Sony Walkman which was also much more than a fad as it dominated the market for years and created a whole new paradigm for listening to music (mood rings should have been so lucky).

Now don’t get me wrong. I like Dell and I realize that what they sell isn’t a particular product so much as a process for selling and servicing any product. Which really makes Rollins’ statement all the more suspect. To put it bluntly, "Dell don’t know product."

So, is the iPod a fad? Could be, if we expand our definition of fad to include terms like trendsetter, technology-changer, and paradigm-buster. But the real issue Rollins misses is the impact the iPod model has on distributed information. Not surprising, I guess, since Dell is in the centralized information business.

The iPod, more than being a device for listening to music, is an information-sharing model that allows users to have control over which information they access and the other pieces of information with which they can combine it. It’s about cool but it’s also about collections, sharing them and distributing them. The iPod means podcasting, images, text, and music. In the future, it and all the clones it spawns, will be primary learning devices that play in our cars, our homes, and everywhere else.

Am I saying the iPod will be here forever, or that it won’t be dethroned as a specific product version of what it represents? Of course not. But I am saying that products like the iPod transcend the concept of fad. More important, the iPod represents a change in the way we will do business when it comes to distributing information.

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