“By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It's brain dead simple, but I'm telling you that is all there is to it.”

– Market Watch's John Dvorak opinion article Missing the point about YouTube

This is a nice, to-the-point article about why YouTube has shot off the charts like a rocket.

This explanation also applies to the iPod. I had 3 (or more?) mp3 players before the iPod was invented and I was happily uploading music onto them. And then the iPod changed the industry to the point where we call mp3 radio broadcasts podcasts. How could the iPod have generated that much momentum? Ease-of-use and pent-up demand. I was willing to tolerate time consuming CD ripping, elaborate music conversion processes, and kludgy interfaces for uploading to a player. Apparently the rest of the world wasn't and Apple knew it.