Steve Jobs was a True Believer and he was a marketing genius. He had a very good product in the Mac. He had a core of True Believers in that product, and yet for all that, the Mac never gained more than a minority part of the desktop market. Part of that may have been price. It seems hard to deny that part of it was the huge advantage that Windows always had in terms of applications. Flash forward to the iPod. It wasn’t a revolutionary product – there were mp3 players before. What the iPod had was iTunes, a huge library of music and an infrastructure designed to support it all. The same story holds true for the iPad and the gazillion ‘There’s an app for that’ goodies it has. No one else would even dare to launch a rival device without thousands of titles ready on day one and a developer community that would hopefully continue to crank out more.

A platform without content is DOA. A platform without a vigorous stream of new content is a dead man walking. The Poser market is consumer, content driven, just as much as the Apple products. You can have a great product with dedicated developers and a small enthusiastic fan base. You can recite the ‘Insanely Great’ mantra. You can say this is all you need, or just wait and see what’s coming next. You can say if it doesn’t exist, you have the tools, make your own. None of those are going to get you past niche status. Those dratted consumers (who happen to make up the majority of the market) want their tunes and their apps and they want them now - preferably wrapped up in one place with swipe your plastic and start enjoying ease. You can sit in an ivory tower making sport of the simple minded rabble down in the bazzar, who somehow fail to see the light. You can take comfort in the fact that you’re driving the future when everyone else clings to the past. You can also bring a knife to a gunfight but I don’t recommend it. If you want to change the rules then you have to understand the existing ones and actually win some games. The fact that someone is actually asking why things aren’t going as great as anticipated is a good first step. The end result though will probably be doubling down on the existing strategy and waiting for the magic to happen. It may indeed happen, but, as Damon Runyon said; "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets."

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken