Bijan Sabet

“Rip. Mix. Burn”

Rip. Mix. Burn.

Those were the three words that came along with the first version of iTunes on the Mac. The message was was rip your CDs, create a playlist and burn a new CD.

This was well before the ipod, or iTunes Music Store, before apple DRM, or before proprietary formats.

Sure there were other desktop music jukebox applications at the time but that first initial version of itunes and that tag line from Apple of “Rip, Mix, Burn” said one thing to me.

We are putting our users first.

They got a lot of heat from the labels at the time for the slogan but Apple never took out or removed cd ripping or mp3 encoding.

There are a number of businesses we look at that have multiple parties in their universe. Advertisers, distributors, carriers, device manufacturers, developers, etc. Its hard to make everyone happy. But if the product is a consumer product then one thing matters above all.

The end user comes first.

Rip, mix, burn.

I loved that slogan. Simple, revolutionary and purposeful.

(Disclaimer: wrote this post quickly on my blackberry so forgive typos)