My colleagues at PaidContent.org shared some insights from a recent Steven Levy article in Newsweek regarding the iPod turniing five.......here are the most entertaining pieces:
iPods are cool and useful, but the fifth anniversary of the digital music player is getting an enormous hype party -- the full cultural milestone treatment, sort of like when Tom Cruise turned 40. Newsweek is the center of the coverage, as you'd expect, since its senior editor Steven Levy has a new book out in which he identifies the iPod as "the perfect thing" and claims it "changed the world." No dispassionate understatement there. Those who enjoy hagiography can read Levy's book (sample overheated assertion: "At one point the universal goal of the literate was to write the Great American Novel. Then the Great American Screenplay. And now, the Great American iTunes Library."), an interview with Steve Jobs in which Levy lobs the airiest of softballs ("What products do you consider cool?"), and a piece of analysis in which Levy finds the Zune inferior to the iPod even though "I haven't handled the Zune device".
It's true that the iPod is fun and the iPod/iTunes software/iTunes store combo is quite efficient. But one of the reasons for the iPod's dominance, which you can't hear because the celebration is so loud, is that so many of the competing systems are terrible. That can't last forever. Microsoft's Zune may not be the one to challenge Apple's digital-music supremacy, but if there's anything true about digital-media industry, it's that someone is always developing a better mousetrap. Let's see what happens when Apple goes against a well-funded competitor with a good product and minimal switching cost. Granted, considering the quality of the competitors now, Apple may celebrate the tenth anniversary before that happens.
(Excerpted from PaidContent.org - 10.17.06)
Having observed a slew of MP3 players come and go over the last several years, and despite my many years of employment at Apple, I'm confident that someone will ultimately come up with a market-worthy competitor to the iPod; whether it's Zune or not remains to be seen.
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Comments (2)
Read More Entries by Kelli Richards.
Creative, Sony and Microsoft have all had a shot and all seem to be lacking. I'm not sure I can imagine anyone else we currently know of that constitutes realistic competition. Could it be that Apple makes it look easy, but in reality it's really hard? Maybe they've earned their position in the marketplace.
That being said, I have to agree about Levy - he seems more like a french court sycophant than a reporter nowadays. Then again, most reporters sound more like sycophants than reporters nowadays, so perhaps they changed the definition of "reporter" when I wasn't looking.
err so let me get this straight..
you accept that Apple has decent product, a well rounded solution with iPod+iTunes.
But you reckon that its dominance is because all the others were crap?
But then you conede that M$ with its Zune flop may not be the one to challenge Apple -- which leaves who exactly?
If MS had dominated this market 5-years ago... as consumers we would all be worse off, we have seen that in the way they have managed their monopoly of Windows.
Fair credit to Apple, they deserve their position, they won it fair and square through innovation -- that reason alone they deserve to win and be a monopoly.