As Jobs explained it in his presentation the day the new iTunes
rolled out, he gave what he hoped would be the last word on the Great
iPod Randomness Controversy: "We're making it
less random to make it
feel
more random." After the event, he summed it all up to me: "When
we talk to people, they say, 'There's two Bob Dylan songs right after
another, how could that be random?' You explain to them it could happen,
it often does. What they really want is to make sure that
doesn't
happen. So we're making sure it doesn't happen. Or [if they want],
making sure it
does happen. Rather than argue whether it's random
or not, we can give them the outcome they want."
-- Steve Jobs. Quoted in
The perfect thing: how the iPod shuffles commerce, culture, and
coolness, by Steven Levy (2006).