Microsoft, Sony Announce iPod Competitors

Pfhreak writes "According to the Denver Post -- Las Vegas section, a little over halfway down the page -- Microsoft will begin selling a $50 music player that will 'look and feel as good as the iPod' later this year. Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft VP, is quoted as saying that the player will give customers more choices than Apple." In related news, Tetsugaku-San writes "The Register has the scoop on Sony's new portable audio/visual playback device. Impressively it plays MPEG2, MPEG4, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and MP3 (finally they got the message Apple was gonna whoop em!) straight out of the box. Not as good battery life as I'd like to see, but real world tests remain to be seen."

Comments

Re:Is there any way

[hondo77]

Of course it's not going to have a similar capacity. All he said was it's going to look neat. More Microsoft FUD and vapor.

Re:Is there any way

[Anonymous Coward]

"this is going to have a similar capacity? If so, IPOD should be out of business with that price difference."

Wow, I don't think anyone could come up with a more succinct statement that summarizes why the Slashdot crowd has absolutely no clue about the portable music player market.

Typical

[BWJones]

In order to let folks know just how cool Microsoft is, they always seem to pre-announce products by several months to years and invariably when they come out, they always seem to be somehow less than they promised. The iPod is good.....damned good. So I am certainly going to take a wait and see approach, but one usually gets what they pay for.

I likely will be sticking with the iPod I suspect.

Price is too low?

[Sean80]

How can they possibly sustain a business selling a player for $50? Oh, I remember, kill the competition with your low-priced alternative, because your Windows and Office products are such cashcows, and then when everybody else is laid waste, jack up the price and add useless features for years and years to come. Oh, and by the way, you need Windows to download the music for your player. Funny that.

Not trying to flamebait or anything, but haven't we seen this type of strategy before?

Dejavu is such a wonderful thing.

Geeks don't understand fashion

[HonkyLips]

These articles shit me. The thing is, Apple is a fashionable company. They make fashionable computers and fashionable products and this puts them in a different league to Microsoft et al. Geeks do not, by their very nature, understand fashion. Microsoft's competing product may be cheaper, Sony's may have more features etc etc. That will mean nothing to a kid who wants an iPod. I doubt that Ferrari were worried when Kia/ Daewoo/ Hyundai popped onto the car scene; I don't think Armani is worried that you can buy shirts for $20 at Kmart, and so on. The Apple iPod is a fashion accessory. Paris Hilton ( or insert vacuous celebrity here) won't be caught dead using a cheap Microsoft rip off and millions of teenagers will feel the same way. Apple could double the price of their iPod range and they'd still sell them. Apples are desirable. They're cool. Microsoft has never been cool and never will be no matter what they do. Can you really imagine a company owned and run by Bill Gates producing something that teenagers everywhere go nuts for? Compare their interface designs to Apple's.... Sony are too sensibly Japanese to be cool. There is no iPod killer. When cool people start saying "Levis are dead - I can buy jeans for 1/5 the price at Target" then maybe, just maybe, Apple should start to worry.....

Re:Is there any way

[sTalking_Goat]

Its cracks me up that what they're aiming for is to "...look and feel like the IPOD."

Whatever happened to outdoing your competitors?

Way to go MS. Aim low.

Re:Is there any way

[stephentyrone]

They clearly aren't overpriced; they sell like hotcakes. Apple has accurately judged the market's demand for the devices, and chosen the appropriate price point. If they actually *were* overpriced, a competitor would have long since come along and undercut them. There are cheaper players, yes, but none as small and/or well executed as the iPod (mini). What apple "should" be charging is what the market will support, looking also to make it difficult for a competitor to beat them on the combination of price/form/function. They've clearly hit the mark, as demand shows. I don't know, maybe you mean "should" in some weird moral sense? I mean, they "should" just give me one, in my ideal universe, but it ain't gonna happen. Other companies have been in the fray for quite some time, and they haven't forced down apple's prices yet; this is a good indication that they're right where they "should" be.

Re:Is there any way

[Halfbaked Plan]

Microsoft doesn't aim 'high' or 'low.' Microsoft aims wide.

Nobody uses Microsoft products has ever been called elitist. MS isn't into selling to narrow niche markets.