The original iPod wasn’t a thunderous success but Apple continued to iterate on it and when they release a non-FireWire version that worked with Windows it really took off.
Had they dogmatically insisted on FireWire and Mac only it may have remained a niche thing.
And of course it greatly contributed to the success of the iPhone because why not get an iPod that could make calls and save pocket space?
Neither the original iPod nor the original iPhone were really devices that most people really viewed as world-changing on their release. I got on at the 4th gen click-wheel iPod and the iPhone 3GS and those were the on-ramps for a lot of other people do. (And I wasn't a Mac user until 2010.)
The original iPod wasn’t a thunderous success but Apple continued to iterate on it and when they release a non-FireWire version that worked with Windows it really took off.
Had they dogmatically insisted on FireWire and Mac only it may have remained a niche thing.
And of course it greatly contributed to the success of the iPhone because why not get an iPod that could make calls and save pocket space?