Music, Maestro
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If I had my choice of any place in the world to live, I would not choose a
castle in France, the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, or even a place on a beach
in Costa Rica. Right now, I�d choose to move into the Apple Store at Biltmore
Fashion Park in Phoenix. A modern, white, techno-Paradise, the Apple Store sells
23� plasma screens, G4 movie-making computers, and the world-class IPOD. (Check
your local listings for an Apple Store near you; I�m sure they all look alike.)

Biltmore Fashion Park is a high end shopping center, and the interior of the
Apple Store is right out of an Italian interior design magazine or an art
gallery. The computers and peripherals on display look like a combination of
furniture and sculpture. When combined with the current ad campaign aimed at
Windows users, this Apple Store is the most incredible merchandising job I can
recall. I went in there to help a friend research laptop computers, but I
emerged with a 20-gig IPOD. And they�re not inexpensive.

Now let�s talk about the IPOD, which has only recently become available for
Windows. It is about the size of a pager, and comes in white plastic or silver.
It is accompanied by sleek ear-buds, a small battery charger that is not really
visible when placed in an electrical outlet (unlike those big black rectangles),
and an even smaller device to control the IPOD remotely while the device itself
is in your pocket. (Fits in there beautifully). Everything about the IPOD is
color-coordinated, right down to the box.

In case you don�t know what an IPOD is, it�s an MP3 player. With it, you can
carry about 4,000 tunes with you, and keep yourself entertained for the better
part of a day. It has a capacity far beyond its nearest competitor, and comes in
three storage sizes. I got the biggest one; the IPOD�s hard drive is the same
size as that of my desktop computer. Among other things, I can now carry the
contents of both CDs of John Friend�s Anusara 101 with me when I travel.

I have also heard that the IPOD has spawned a new crime: owners go into computer
stores, connect their IPODs to the 1394 port on a computer, and rapidly download
software to the IPOD without paying for it.

Yesterday at an economic forecast breakfast I heard the futurist Dr. James
Canton (www.futureguru.com) speak. He talked about the four power tools of
twenty-first century business: ubiquitous connections, collaboration,
nanotechnology, and biotechnology. Within that context, he said that any
business that develops a solution to empower its customers would own those
customers. Indeed, the IPOD empowers its customers, especially if you have also
bought the package of speakers JBL sells with it: called �The Creature.�

The Creature is a sub-woofer than looks like a character from a science fiction
movie, accompanied by two small speakers that look like its children. They are
all made of shiny white plastic. I�ve set the IPOD and The Creature up in my
exercise room, replacing an antiquated (and ugly) set of black audio components.
My exercise room is now the best looking room in the house.

But for me, the joy of the IPOD will come largely from being able to take with
me all the music I downloaded from Napster before it became illegal, including
everything from Bessie Smith to Bob Marley and Nelly to Neil Young. No more
bulky Case Logics and CD-Walkmen that use four AA batteries every half hour. And
good-bye even to my lastgen Intel MP3 Concert Audio Player, with its limited
capacity. I haven�t gotten this high on a gadget since I got my Palm phone.

The IPOD did expose my own weaknesses, however. It files all your music through
software called MusicMatch. I have this software on my desktop, and I even went
so far as to collect all my tunes in its library. But MusicMatch enables you to
make playlists, and I never bothered to do that. Everything in my library is
alphabetical, which means if I want to play a group of songs, they will probably
be only the �A�s or the �C�s, and not any meaningful or even related selections.

Bummer. I have to go back and organize my music into easily available segments.
In my spare time, I will do this. It�s a small price to pay for the kind of
power that comes with the IPOD.