You can tell a lot about a person by this shoes...and by his MP3 player,

 

The iPodiatrist

by Del Miller

November 26, 2001

 

I hate buying shoes.

You would too if you were graced with feet like mine; big, ugly, floppy things that mushroom out on the pavement like eleven pounds of boneless chicken. My closet is lined with forelorn, forsaken footware; all blown out at the gunwales from the spread of archless metatarsals. If it walks like a duck...it's probably me.

I stand at the shoestore window and admire the svelte and fashionable models arrayed in those artsy attitudes favored by the window-dresser's guild. All toe down and heel up, sleek and handsome as brand new saddles. But, alas, this stylish fare is not for me; the models on display are made for feet that tread the well-worn heights of the bell curve and their graceful lines scale badly in the gunboat sizes that I need. Tapered toes looks dandy on normal shoes, but on my feet they look more at home on a ski jump. Thick, manly soles are fine for Joe Normal, but when I set my half acre of Vibram clumping down the sidewalk, mothers hustle their children off the street. That little accent stripe of colorful trim? You know; the one that makes your shoes so jaunty? Well on my mine it swells to billboard proportions into a gaudy, Bozo the Clown type effect.

It looks a lot better in size eight. Really.

Good looks and comfort are shoe qualities governed by a perverse physical law that, at best, allows either but not both. Wrapped around feet the size of beef carcasses it poses a significant problem for your average mall shoestore and for the average shoe salesman, a problem that ranks right up there with Fermat's Theorem - judging from the typical blank stares and helpless shrugs.

I need a real shoestore and a real shoe salesman. Somebody who knows feet and feels enough involvement with his profession to look at my misbegotten dogs and see beauty, or at least a challenge of some sort. Somebody who feels they are less of a shoe salesman, I guess, and more of a podiatrist.

No Mean Feet

That's why I like Harry. Harry's shoemanship is as close to podiatry as you can get without taking Wednesday's off and driving a Mercedes. When I walk into Harry's old shoestore, he casts a knowing look at my feet, he runs an expert finger along the treadwear pattern on the sole, he carefully notes where the shoe leather is stretched thin, he minutely examines the flat spots on the insoles; then he gives me a wink and says, "I got just the thing for you." I suspect that he's had just the right thing for his customers for a long time.

Which probably explains how Harry's little shop has managed to remain in business against the mega-chain shoe stores that fill the malls like toadstools after a rain. So I asked Harry if he had trouble competing with the chain stores and he said, "Nah, people have always needed good shoes and they always will."

All of this came to mind as I read a November 12th interview with Steve Jobs in Fortune Magazine on the subject of Apple's new MP3 player, the iPod. Interviewer Brent Schlender asked Jobs why the company chose to produce a handheld music player rather than the handheld organizer that the world seemed to be expecting. Jobs answered, in part, "I don't think early cultures had organizers, but I do know they had music. It's in our DNA. Everybody loves it. This isn't a speculative market."

Well, there you have it folks: Harry was right. The secret to product marketing is to produce products which meet those innermost needs that people have always had and will always want to satisfy. There is no need for focus groups or market research - all you have to do is figure out what humans needed back in those pre-Flood days when they began to dance around campfires beating sticks together, turn it into a computer peripheral and ZIP! - you've got a surefire hit on your hands.

Opposed thumbs are for sissies

Examples of this prehistoric product marketing abound. Ancient people needed to make fire and of course we moderns still do. But instead of lugging around pieces of flint and and fluffy bits of tinder we nowadays have the handheld equivalent: the pocket lighter with nifty piezoelectric ignition systems and clever windproof screens that somehow never quite work unless the windows are sealed and the air-conditioner is turned off.

Keeping track of your goats may have been problematic in the days when handheld calculators were... well, when they were your hands. But of course we have since moved from counting digits to counting on digital and we now see electronic models that not only help Mom keep track of her grocery bills but also allow her to calculate Taylor series expansions of complex polynomial expressions - should she find the need.

The ancient craft of trailblazing and pathfinding has passed from keen-eyed, deerskin clad tribesmen tracking possum poop to moving-map handhelds that allow modern homo sapiens to either find their way home from an all night drunk or to call in airstrikes on enemy bunkers with unmatched levels of mobile convenience and digital precision.

Long range communication has likewise progressed from smoke signals and jungle drums to the tidier if more socially questionable cellphone, and now modern day warriors can plan their battles and warn of invaders while doing their thing at any public urinal.

All these gadgets seem to be pretty popular so it seems there may be something to this Neandertalic marketing concept; at least it seems to have worked in the recent past. But can this weighty theory be applied to future products where our primitive desires can be be sublimated by the simple expedient of a computer related, handheld peripheral?

Food for the sole

Take the simple act of feeding ourselves. The grand, neolithic tradition of hunting and gathering has since evolved, apace with the rest of humanity, into a cultural smorgasboard ranging from bagels to Bon-Bons and from ketchup to kebabs. Surely then, the increasingly pervasive reach of consumer electronics would continue this onward march from hand-to-mouth existence toward handheld-to-mouth fine dining. The future might find some handheld, bistro equivalent - some high-tech device to forge the future of foraging. Perhaps a touch of a scroll wheel on some GPS equipped, net enabled iPizza could scan the ether for the nearest sauce parlor, perform a bit of competitive pricing with an onboard RISC processor (that in more primitive days would have been used to design nuclear weaponry) and then e-order your stuffed-crust standard with your favorite mix of toppings; a recipe downloaded daily from your biorythm generated, desktop database via high speed firewire. No longer would late night munchies require a painful decision process and a tiresome finger-walk through The Yellow Pages to find that rarest of animals - pizza delivery at three a.m. Such is progress.

iPizza - Not Sold In Stores

Though grand that future might seem, it can be plausibly argued that these scenarios pretty well exhaust the range of basic human needs. Music, food, fire, communication, comfortable shoes, knowing what you have and where on earth you keep it; these issues more or less cover the waterfront of basic animal demands and with it, preclude further possibilities for solutions based on handheld computer peripherals. Ok, except for sex I suppose, but it's pretty obvious that sex doesn't offer much opportunity for a handheld, consumer electronic device... I mean, not for a computer peripheral that is.... I mean, nothing that requires digital....uh...

Ya know, I'm picking up a few interesting visuals here... the concepts need a little work... hmm.

Let me think about this...

Shoes for Industry!

So anyway, a cursory examination of the reduction of basic needs into a handheld, electronic bazaar might lead us to think that Steve Job's justification of the iPod makes perfect sense - simply update the primitive and rake in the moolah. But I'm not so sure.

Regardless of what Harry says, his shoestore succeeds not because he sells good shoes - lot's of places do that - but rather in the way that he goes about it. If he were to compete with the chain stores, by just providing the basic styles for the average person at the lowest price, economies of scale would drive him out of business in a month. What really pays Harry's bills is the fact that his customers walk out of the store knowing that Harry cares about them.

The value added advantage of Apple's iPod isn't that it makes music - MP3 players are everywhere - but more that the entire design speaks to the attention that Apple paid to the user's experience. The small size yet high capacity, the slick appearance and simple interface, the long battery life and quick download; plus the trouble free connectivity enabled by the iTunes2 software: These and another dozen or so features of the iPod are more than impressive specifications - they are the little things that make a customer's experience a more pleasant one. It says that Apple thinks enough of the customer to really pay attention to all the esoteric nuances.

The real lineage from Macintosh to iPod, the essential Apple-ness found in each, is in the feeling you get that somebody - several somebodies, in fact - burned a lot of midnight oil trying to make a product that would make you say, "Ooooooh!" You get the distinct impression that the folks at Apple aren't satisfied that you bought their product already, they also want you to know that they were thinking about you when they made it. There's more to the product than just the music, more to the buying decision than a simple cost/benefit ratio, and more to the choice than the hankering for some primitive backbeat.

If the iPod turns out to be a success it will be for the intangibles that Apple so often gets right. You might pay a little more for the iPod for the same reason that I pay a little more for Harry's shoes. It's not just the iPod you're buying, it's the iPodiatrist.

Copyright 2001, Del Miller. All rights reserved.

Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com

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