Quixote
In the latest This Week in Tech, good friend Leo Laporte hosted, among other people, Dave Winer.
During the show, Dave (with whom I’ve had dust-ups before) claims that Podcasting in iTunes had nothing to do with why Ray Slakinski and I gave up developing iPodderX, the first true podcasting application. Of course, Dave never talked to Ray or me about this. He makes a blanket statement about iPodderX with absolutely no information whatsoever (something he regularly lambasts journalists for).
The fact of the matter is this: Yes, iTunes killed iPodderX, plain and simple. Here’s a graph of our sales:
As you can easily see, iTunes 4.9 with podcasting caused a precipitous drop in sales.
Sure, Ray and I could have pursued iPodderX for a while longer, and we debated long and hard about what to do. But, as usual, Dave is missing out on a couple of really important details.
First, unlike Dave, I’m not independently wealthy. Like most people, I need to work to pay the bills. Creating and distributing software for free doesn’t appeal to my girlfriend, my bank, or my mortgage holder, and while Ray and I would have loved to continue working on iPodderX, it simply didn’t make financial sense.
Second, podcasting is simply the reading of syndicated information, in most cases in an RSS feed. This means that podcasting clients are basically specialized RSS readers. In fact, iPodderX had already become a full-fledged newsreader long before iTunes 4.9. If we had kept developing iPodderX, we’d have had not one, but two 800 pound gorillas to deal with: Apple with iTunes, and Newsgator with NetNewsWire.
We had no interest in fighting these two behemoths; it’s not hard to see that we’d have gotten crushed. And, given that NetNewsWire/Newsgator is now free (and other RSS readers are following suit), I am more certain than ever that Ray and I made the right decision at the right time.
It’s funny that Winer uses this podcast to plug the “podcasting application” he’s working on himself. I wish him luck, but, as I survey the market, I know he’ll get very few users, and certainly not enough to make a dent in the iTunes hegemony.
iTunes won, Dave, but you go right ahead tilting at those windmills.
[Update: Here’s Ray’s take.]
[Update 2: Ray has updated his post to include graphical data from the iPodder/Juice project. Even though theirs was open source and free, their download count mimics our sales, and the release of iTunes 4.9 had the same effect on them.]
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