Steven Levy has an interesting interview with Steve Jobs about the iPod (which is going to be five years old soon). Sample:

Levy: Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?

Jobs: We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.