I work primarily with Hardcore Apple Partisans. When they'd ask what Ping was, I'd say "It's this thing where you can buy a song and then talk about it with your friends."
Their eyes would be fluttering away by the end of the sentence. Nobody, not a one ever, cared at all. There are a thousand other venues to discuss music with friends, most of them involving alcohol.
I personally feel Ping could have been amazing were it a rewards shop that rewarded you with extras for buying tracks.
You buy a top single - a free remix of that song is offered on the side. Nothing obligatory, just extra.
You buy an album - Ping provides that album's music videos and a writeup from the band.
You buy a pop song from a hot entertainer - you're entered into a raffle for show tickets.
You buy a karaoke standard - Ping asks for your best Photo Booth karaoke version that gets uploaded, shared, and voted on next to that standard.
If it was value-adding what you were buying, I think that would be interesting. But hearing your Address Book chime in on a trashy single you bought? No thank you.
It would be cool if it worked like a prediction market as well, so that if you were one of the first people to buy a song that later became very popular you could actually make money.
I buy a decent amount of albums, and I do 90% Amazon MP3 and 10% iTunes - Amazon MP3 is consistently $1+ cheaper, which amounts to a free album every 7 or 8, in comparison. iTunes would need some serious deals to beat that.
Rolling iTunes Originals into Ping somehow could've partially solved that problem. Using Ping (?) would give users exclusive access to original content.
Honestly, a Last.fm acquisition would've been their best bet.
"At this point, years into the social networking phenomenon, why not leave the social stuff to the social people who are good at it?"
While I acknowledge that Ping was a huge failure the above statement strikes me as odd. If that's so obvious then...
Why not leave Maps to people who are good at it? Why not leave voice recognition to people who are good at it? Why not leave... etc. Apple hasn't been shy about diving into competitor's markets... which I don't always agree with fully. But on the flip side, you don't know if you don't try I guess.
That explains why iOS is not a good platform. The owner of this platform loses his focus (building a good platform, giving developers more power), instead it starts to duplicate developers' effort in the name of user experience. Surely they have a chance of doing it better, but it is just because they can use their private APIs.
Are you very familiar with iOS development? I ask because those people I know who are were very happy with the improvements and APIs added in past iOS releases and seem to be delighted with what's being released with iOS 6.
Perhaps you've found yourself hampered by the lack of certain APIs that Apple has yet to add or yet to promote from SPI. I know some devs in that boat. But I don't think you can accuse Apple of having lost focus on the iOS platform, or that they aren't feverishly working to give devs more power.
A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support. I don't want to go too far into the details, just let me tell you this: ESC, Function Keys,CTRL, ALT are all dead.
I submitted a feature request among other developers like the month iPad came out. So far, no any sign of adding it. Yet we continue to see Apple adding this message that reminder.
I'm probably not the worlds biggest Apple fan, but:
A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support
Umm.. no it isn't. It's pretty clear iOS is designed for devices without a physical keyboard, and if that is important to you then you will always be working on something Apple doesn't think is important. Their priority there is quite clear and I don't think it is reasonable to blame them for that.
(Written by someone who likes a physical keyboard and is very happy with my Asus Transformer)
As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of developers can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable further innovation? We are not talking about a Siri level of feature, we are talking of a trivial platform feature that basically a decent engineer in Apple should be able to do it in a week, testing included.
As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of developers can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable further innovation?
I'm not sure if you want to hear the answer to that or not.
It's economics & platform strategy. Ping was created to attempt to increase the stickiness of the iTunes platform, to appease the record labels (who wanted an alternative to MySpace) and to bring Apple closer to Facebook. All of those things were major strategic goals for Apple at the time.
Making the iPad something more like a laptop when the MacBook Air already exists? The only way your "bug" will get traction within Apple is if someone decides that is a goal of the iOS platform. That might happen, but pulling an Apple engineer for a whole week off other projects to work on it seems unlikely to happen without fairly major executive sponsorship.
There are tons of cases where iPad could be better off with a keyboard, especially for productivity apps. Come on, android has full keyboard support from day one.
And what percentage of users actually use the full keyboard support? I mean, with Android tablets we're asking "what is a low percent of a tiny number of people", but still. Being able to use an external keyboard with your phone/tablet is a very, very niche activity.
Just translate that from corp speak into normal human language: "At this point, years into the social phenomenon, I can't imagine what the heck we were even trying to accomplish with this."
We'll see whether Apple Maps is actually better than Google Maps. I have doubts, Apple has always been a bit lackluster in online services. Even Siri is rather unreliable.
> Apple didn't implement their own custom voice recognition software.
And Google didn't implement their own custom mobile OS. You don't have to build your own to move into a product space - it counts if you do so via purchase.
Ping was a concession to the labels who asked for an alternative to MySpace with a revenue model. It was never given much attention by Apple internally, nor was it a source of "pride" for anyone really.
I remember when it was first introduced, a good number of us at labels were thinking, "great, another marketing platform to update for a bit, then have go stale."
Plus it was supposed to have Facebook integration, which was pulled quickly after launch.
When we've already built up 99% of the infrastructure required to share anything we want (e.g. messages, photos, videos, links, entire pages on Facebook), it's very hard to see the point of a service that specializes in sharing exactly one thing.
The timing was also horrible. Some of the technologies currently available for sharing are 5 or 10 years old or more, so what the heck was supposed to be revolutionary about Ping? It needed to arrive before there was Facebook or Twitter.
I actually thought the timing could have been good. When it was announced, MySpace was clearly in death-spiral mode but still a lot of bands were using it as their primary online presence. I thought Ping had at least a shot at being the place they moved to.
Obviously it didn't work out that way. My hunch is that Apple's feelings on the project were "lets throw this out there and see if it sticks". It clearly didn't, and now they'll move on. When you're making $1500 in profit a second you can experiment a little.
> My hunch is that Apple's feelings on the project were "lets throw this out there and see if it sticks"
Which is somewhat uncharacteristic of Apple and what some folks blame Google for doing repeatedly. I hope Ping's failure resulted in a lot of lessons learned about the social space.
It's actually really interesting that this product took so long to get axed.
Even Google+ had an initial surge of users that loved it (and some still do), but I've never met anyone that was a Ping lover (or, as far as I know, even a willing Ping user).
Actually, Steve Jobs' track record is closer to 50-50 in terms of successes vs failures. The difference is that his failures were usually not very significant, and his successes were monstrous.
Are you counting the totally unprofitable development of NeXTStep as a success or failure (considering that NeXT would very likely have died had Apple not bought them)?
(Those same APIs and objective paradigms became the basis for the entire iOS app ecosystem, via MacOS...)
Last.fm was sold to CBS in 2007. It also has lots of legacy client apps on many different platforms to support - I doubt that's something Apple would want to do.
Their eyes would be fluttering away by the end of the sentence. Nobody, not a one ever, cared at all. There are a thousand other venues to discuss music with friends, most of them involving alcohol.
I personally feel Ping could have been amazing were it a rewards shop that rewarded you with extras for buying tracks.
You buy a top single - a free remix of that song is offered on the side. Nothing obligatory, just extra.
You buy an album - Ping provides that album's music videos and a writeup from the band.
You buy a pop song from a hot entertainer - you're entered into a raffle for show tickets.
You buy a karaoke standard - Ping asks for your best Photo Booth karaoke version that gets uploaded, shared, and voted on next to that standard.
If it was value-adding what you were buying, I think that would be interesting. But hearing your Address Book chime in on a trashy single you bought? No thank you.