You should check out the music visualizer that comes with iTunes 7. It’s actually quite good; miles above the built-in visualizers that used to come with Windows Media Player and older versions of iTunes. Apple bought it from one guy, a passionate and creative programmer. Here’s a hypothetical for how this played out and how it involved Steve Jobs’ greatest strengths — his ability to know the customer, and his ability to make money out of it (in a way, Steve Jobs is a brilliant business analyst and a brilliant product manager).

Just like he knows the customers who buy his products, he also got to know that dude that created the visualizer. Say that this is the kind of dude who prefers to have put hundreds of hours of programming time to sell a thousand copies of his visualizer, even though if he had worked at a tech company he would have been worth more (the fact that our dude sold the visualizer, as opposed to having offered it for free, makes it more realistic to make sure comparisons). This fact means that to this single programmer, it’s more important to produce something by himself, either out of passion for technology or out of desire to be famous. In either case, it’s to the dude’s advantage if his visualizer appears in the newest version of iTunes.

This means that Apple will be able to negotiate a great deal, and will probably have to pay much less than the software is worth. Plus, there’s an ace up Apple’s sleeve. Consider what a visit from an Apple rep would look like for this guy.

• Apple Rep: Hey, do you want to sell the visualizer to us? It will appear in the newest version of iTunes.
• Dude: Will everyone know I wrote it?
• Apple Rep: No. We’ll use this and that legal technicality so you appear to be an Apple employee and all Apple employees produce their software anonymously for us.
• Dude: How much will you pay me?
• Apple Rep: The fair market value of your software is X. We’ll pay you 80% of that.
• Dude: So, let me get this straight. You’ll pay me less than my software is worth and nobody will know I wrote it?
• Apple Rep: That’s right.
• Dude: Even if for some reason I was OK with this, I am going to say no on principle.
• Apple Rep: OK, we’ll go to another dude who wrote a similar visualizer. And then another. Ultimately one of them will say yes.
• Dude: Damn you, you know that I know that it’s very unlikely that every freelance programmer out there will refuse on the basis of principles. I hesitantly agree.
• Apple Rep: (Casually announces as he’s half way through exiting the room) You know what? For being such a sport we’ll give you an iPod thus make you euphoric over the fact that you managed to make the first friend on your new mercenary path of life.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 15:03 and is filed under clever, fiction, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.