Apple’s Ping to End With a Thud in Next Release of iTunes

http://allthingsd.com/20120612/apples-ping-to-end-with-a-thud-in-next-release-of-itunes/

by danso • 14 years ago

54 39 14 years ago

mikek• 14 years ago

Ping is one of the few Steve Jobs-approved product failures. Even MobileMe eventually morphed into iCloud. Ping was DOA.

dmix• 14 years ago

It was built with music studios in mind, not music fans.

Plus it didn't improve over time and was rarely marketed.

steve8918• 14 years ago

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.

sneak• 14 years ago

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...)

david_shaw• 14 years ago

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).

jpxxx• 14 years ago

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.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

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.

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

A bit like Amie Street? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street

whichdan• 14 years ago

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.

chrisdroukas• 14 years ago

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.

leothekim• 14 years ago

These things happen. Next.

51Cards2• 14 years ago

"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.

chj4• 14 years ago

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.

ryannielsen• 14 years ago

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.

georgespencer• 14 years ago

> That explains why iOS is not a good platform.

I don't know anyone–not Android developers, not iOS developers, not Apple engineers, not Google engineers-who thinks that iOS is not a good platform.

dwc• 14 years ago

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."

taligent• 14 years ago

Why not leave Maps ? Because Google wasn't going to provide the APIs necessary to implement turn by turn navigation.

Why not leave Voice Recognition ? They do. Apple didn't implement their own custom voice recognition software.

fpgeek• 14 years ago

Why not leave ebooks? I can't see anything Apple has gained that makes up for all of the problems that move has created.

meepmorp• 14 years ago

> 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.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

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.

makecheck• 14 years ago

I think Ping was too specific.

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.

bodyfour• 14 years ago

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.

r00fus• 14 years ago

> 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.

michaelhoffman• 14 years ago

And nothing of value was lost.

ethank• 14 years ago

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.

Groxx2• 14 years ago

>“We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said ‘This isn’t something that I want to put a lot of energy into,’” Cook said.

Good. That is exactly the kind of decision they should be making. Thank you, Cook, for rather quickly killing something that deserved to die.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

Quickly here meaning about 2 years.

Groxx2• 14 years ago

In the media world, that's warp 10.

kittxkat• 14 years ago

I always wondered why Apple never aquired Last.fm, it's such a simple service and would've perfectly fitted within iTunes.

bnr• 14 years ago

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.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

I remember one of the big selling points was basically artist blogs, like Lady Gaga. Were those ever updated?

Apple’s Ping to End With a Thud in Next Release of iTunes

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