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Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market
kurtz_tan writes "Creative Technology is spending 100 million in a marketing blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market which is now led by the Apple iPod (54% of the market last year for MP3 players that use hard disks). Creative is second with 16.5%. Does Creative Zen sound as cool as Apple iPod ?" And reader TheMediaWrangler writes "The Register reports that Apple will build a stockpile of flash-based iPods to be shipped as early as January or February of 2005. AppleInsider had the original scoop."
54% of total portable music market, 92% of hard drive-based market.
I've owned two iPods, and I've never taken a look at one of Creative's offerings. As has been said (probably) countless times every time an iPod story shows up here, Apple has the Holy Trinity of online music: Software (iTunes), Store (iTMS), Player (iPod). You're just not going to beat Apple until you come to the field with at least those three pieces.
Wow, why don't they spend $100 million on making a superior product in stead of marketing an inferior one?
Yes, but is Creative's offering an iPod Killer?
From the AppleInsider article:
Although the iPod holds a whopping 92% slice of the pie for hard drive-based players, this figure shrinks to 65% when flash models are tallied as part of the mix.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead, how about cutting the price a little more? Digital music players are a huge market, and not everyone can afford an Ipod. You don't need to market it as cool and hip, just market it as functional and not so damned expensive. I have a Zen, and it's a wonderful player, but you're not gonna win anyone over appealing to style; Apple has that covered.
Oh you can't count the iPods in NYC? I was visiting the city this summer and was standing outside the Trump building on Madison with a friend, playing what we called "the iPod game". We were trying to either spot people with white iPod headphones, or people geeky/trendy enough to know where the Apple Store was. We had no success finding the Apple Store (however did find another retailor, who was stocked out of the Mini I wanted to buy). It was none the less an amusing game to play; I'd estimate of 1000 people walking by: 25 people were stopped, 2 had iPods, 10 were out of towners, 5 were attractive, 2 of those were willing to chat it up, and 0 knew of, or where the Apple store was
I bought the Zen Nomad because it was certainly a lot cheaper than the comparable iPod at the time, and I liked it. Yes it was larger, but the battery was good. Now it's dead, and since I've gone iTunes I decided to switch. There's stuff I miss (like making playlists on the player itself) but I have to admit the iPod is really nice. The AAC files take about half the space as MP3s and sound better. I didn't do a scientific study but on several songs with quiet passages the MP3 version sucks compared to AAC, and the MP3 was encoded at the max bit rate.
And it's about half the size!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Why not spend that $100,000,000 on reducing the cost of their MP3 players and let them sell themselves?
This is something i've always found strange.
MABASPLOOM!
Hmm. I think Creative is receiving its just desserts since the release of the first Nomad Jukebox.
They had a special team in their R&D center in Scotts Valley design that product, and then after it was done, they laid off most of the people in that project team and outsourced them to a less-experienced team in Singapore.
Consequently, some of the team was picked up by Apple which went on to develop the second rev iPod.
Detachment 3 Media
Exposed, Exploited, Exploded
Whenever there's an iPod vs X brand player, the same arguments pop up. Well, I'm an iPod fan, trough and through. And now I understand why.
The iPod does its few tasks with a 'very good' rating for all of them. FireWire transfer = Very good. Biggish screen, backlit but (for the most part) no colours = Very good, sound quality = Very good, battery capacity = Very good (12 h), expandability = Very good (lots of accessories, much more than the others), design = Very good, UI = Very good.
The reason for for its success is the average 'Very Good' rating that users and critiques give it.
What about the others? Well, usually they have one outstanding feature but that is not enough to raise the overall user experience to the iPod level.
We geeks often put on blinders when it comes to gadgets and forget what people want. And while we may choose another product because we evaluate OGG-support to be an 'Excellent' feature, most people do not. They see like this: FireWire transfer = Very good. Small screen, backlit but (for the most part) no colours = bad, sound quality = Very good, battery capacity = Very good (12 h), expandability = bad, design = bad, UI = fair, OGG support = WTF?
And the round goes to iPod. In my work, I have tried out a huge number of iPod 'killers', and frankly they don't reach to the knees of iPod for an average person. I saw this hot chick on the tram today, she had a 2001 Creative Nomad. It was twice or three times the size of my old portable Sony CD player. Apple chose the right direction early and are now reapling the benefits.
"Currently, Creative has 600 research and development staff working on its MP3 players, and plans to hire another 300 engineers."
This is why the Creative products will never be as good. 600 people in R&D for their player? What are all those people doing, reading fark?
You'd think they'd hire 5 people with imagination to replace the 450 people who aren't doing anything except meeting with each other.
Creative is going on an all-out blitz/preemptive strike against Apple, which will immediately become a contender in January for the flash-based player market.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
iPods have been able to play MP3's for longer than they have been able to play M4A's and M4P's... IIRC, the original 5 GB iPod didn't even have support for AAC (much less the DRM.) iTunes originated as a Mac MP3 player called SoundJam.
However, Steve personally didn't like the audio quality of MP3s and defaulted iTunes to burn them at 160 kbps instead of the traditional 128 kbps. This combined with the inital iPod's support only for the Mac platform limited its appeal until Apple integrated MPEG-4 and it's AAC codec into QuickTime. Once this occured, Apple finally had a "ideological" business reason to leverage the iPod onto the Windows platform: as a way to reinforce QT installations on PCs. QuickTime technology drives many of Apple's high scale packages, like Final Cut Pro, as well as making a good PR platform to keep Macs on the radar, so more visibility of QT verses Real or Window Media was in line with Apple's historical biases.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
The first hard-drive based MP3 player I bought was a Creative. The second was an Apple. Why did I switch? Simple, the software that shipped with the Creative was lousy. I ended up buying the Notmad software from an independent third party and that was much better, but I really don't feel like I should have to. My MP3 player should just appear as an external hard drive in Windows, should work as easily in Linux, and the MP3 software should be of high quality as well.
I can't say I'm particularly impressed with iTunes, mind you, but at least an iPod appears as an external drive when I plug it in. I don't need to cart around extra software to install.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
...it's really no contest. I had a Creative 20 Gb Nomad Jukebox that I bought at the end of 2002. Had it for a year, and it was...serviceable. It was bulky (I know not a problem with the Zen as much), the interface was awful, and the software was beyond horrific. I got my iPod in December 2003. It's been flawless. My biggest gripe with it is shorter battery life, but that's only because I actually use it for 8 hours a day, unlike the Nomad, which was clunky in every way it was possible to be clunky. Sure, the iPod is luxury-priced, but it's worth it to me. I suppose Creative has improved their products (likely) and software (doubtful) since I last used them, but I wouldn't go back to try.
Man, I hate that attitude.
Hey, here's this neat thing but since everyone else has it, I'm not going to try it and see if it really is as neat as it seems. Because I'm different.
It's a freaking music player. Try it, don't try it, but letting its popularity affect your decision is just stupid.
I was going to agree with you, but I bet most people do. So I am going to have to disagree with you.
AAC is essentially MP4, so Creative would be behind Apple by about 3 years in this regard.
From http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/ - Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is at the core of the MPEG-4, 3GPP, and 3GPP2 specifications
You know up till quite recently Apple was all about saying over and over "Flash Sucks". Jobs made a point of dissing the Flash players during the interviews around the iPod Mini launch, even toting them on stage like trophies. And of course all the loyal Apple Maniacs went around repeating his NO FLASH mantra as if it were natural law.
I notice recently the anti-Flash hype within Apple has settled down to imperceptible...
The biggest argument made is that disk is cheaper for lots of storage. Well Flash is definitely not cheaper, but it does offer a different kind of convenience.
Say Apple sold a Flash player for $100 with minimal memory bundled but with an SD/CF slot.
Now, you can buy 1GB CF cards for arounnd $50 these days, and 1GB SD cards for around $60. And I've seen them go for $40 after rebate. Afvter rebate prices basically presage the sticker price in 4 months time...
So if you sell $100 iPods to "kids" or people who don't want to plunk down a larger bag of cash at once, then you can lock them in by selling them an "upgrade" 1GB (or the forthcoming 2Gb cards) for around $50 every few months.
Carrying around several SD cards is no big deal, they are tiny. You can get a caddy that holds 10Gb and is smaller than the end of your thumb.
Organizing different artists or genres on different cards also offers an easy, physical way for people to manage their collections without resorting to extreme tagging and playlist noodling.
One advantage of the Flash media model is also that the price of "upgrades" basically halves every 9 months or so. So if you don't want to add 5GB now, you can settle for adding only 1GB, knowing that in a year's time you could spend the same amount of money for another 2GB.
Consider also the possible business advantages of selling these low-end cards for Apple. The selling price of the cards could be subsidized by including bundled songs for a fee - a great way for record companies to distribute new music gratis. Or snippets of songs as adverts, jungles, or ringtones. This could lower the retail price of an Apple-branded "media card" by 10-20%.
Yes, even given the continued growth in capacity of flash media, they will never equal the price or capacity of hard disk media. However, at what point does enough space become too much? Lots of people seem to be happy with their iPod Minis, and they have a tiny capacity compared to some other options available.
It seems like lots of people are happy with just a few GB of music "on-hand" at any time. Hell, people get by with 256MB players! When and if Flash capacities reach the 4GB mark for $50 (I give it two years tops) then wouldn't a lot of the people who currently buy iPod Minis also consider a similar, half-priced iPod Flash?
That's a big market opportunity any way you slice it.
Of course, to really slim down Apple will have to do something about the iconic wheel interface. It's a nice design but it does take up a lot of front space on the device and constrains the screen size. Look at the iPod Photo - it's screen is lame and tiny ans resembles the old Archos Muldimedia players from a few years ago. At that time everyone lambasted them for releasing a "multimedia" player with such ridiculously tiny screens.
But Archos was just not thinking far ahead and went with maintaining their familiar audio jukebox interface. They learned from their mistake and upped the screen size on the newer models to take up most of the front panel.
What is the option for Apple? If they want to keep the wheel but shrinkthe devices *and* make the screen larger then they have to either A) put the wheel on the backside of the device, trusting users to navigate by touch, or B) convert the wheel into a software-simulation using on-screen display.
Apple has invested a lot of marketing collateral in their wheel design but it does constrain their effectiveness going forwward in a shrink of the iPod form factor for Flash sizes, especially for Asian markets where smaller is definitely much much better!
Da Blog
Where did this quote come from? If it was said by somebody at Creative, that shows a remarkable sense of hubris and entitlement that is out of place in a competitive marketplace.
Just because you were first major player in the MP3 player market doesn't mean you are entitled to stay there. Look at Apple, they were first to the mass market with a GUI-based computer, and they didn't maintain any dominance there, did they? Apple's not even your real enemy; their iTunes player supported the Rio series in the early days, and still supports many of them on the Mac platform. Apple chose the high end player space; Creative chose the low end. Apple got lucky this time around. No sense whining about it...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
You know Creative used to have a virtual monopoly on ugly pimpified mp3 players. For years iPod fashionistas were able to hew to the purity of the white form. Endless tedious column inches were spewed in blogs and media about the flawless design purity of the iPod. They were, of course, ignoring the popularity of variously coloured covers and after-market skins for the iPod. And the iPod's slow drift into chromism...
Then came the first rift in the iPod's White Power Ideology: the iPod Mini. Suddenly it was available in, let's face it, some pretty girly pastels and the Cult of iPod had to adapt to pay homage to this new reality.
But now there's the U2 iPod. Black and Red. A testament to gaudy ugliness. It's like the A-Team Van was recycled with go-faster stripes. It out-blacks the iRivers and out-pimps the Creatives. Apple has definitely made a land grab for the ugly mp3 territory. Creative can no longer claim the Ugly Throne.
Well done. I hope the iPod Flash comes in hot pink.
Da Blog
I think it's a Red State vs Blue State kind of thing. NC is a Red State, so you'll see a lot of the players with the WMA Ready sticker on them, whereas NY is a Blue State so you'll see more iPod's.
More likely, it's a public transportation thing.
People who take trains, busses and ferry boats to work were the first ones to buy Walkman radios back in the day. This is pretty much the same trend. Having headphones means not having to talk to the weirdo sitting next to you on the bus. Having an iPod instead of a radio means you won't lose the signal when you go through a tunnel. For somebody who spends two hours a day in such an environment, $400 probably doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend on making the time more pleasant.
People mostly drive to work in "Jesusland", so even when they listen to iPods during their commute, nobody else sees them.
Disclaimer: I live in the suburbs of a "light blue" state and drive to work. Nevertheless, I would rather go without the use of my legs than go without my iPod.
P.S. Not to nit-pick, but if you shade by percentage of victory in each district, and most states are actually solid purple. I think that people are making a little too much of "cultural differences" between the states.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"I think the important statistic is: Apple's market share is more than Creative's market share"
Well, I'm one of 'Creative's market share' and my comment is "probably never again"
I've never seen such bad software (both Windows drivers, and on-board software), and having a bigger hard drive for less money than the iPod is starting to wear thin as an excuse for it.
Spend advertising money all you like, I'm not buying my replacement jukebox until it comes with Linux drivers that are guaranteed to work.
Will someone please tell the writer of that article that the HP iPod is literally a rebranded Apple iPod? That puts Apple's marketshare at 91%.
Albuquerque PC
This is Creative's history of innovation...
Original SB:
Adding a gameport and DAC to the ADLIB FM synthesizer. This product was an incredible success, and got them very rich. Unfortunately they haven't done anything since besides let others innovate and then buy them out.
First PCI soundcard with SB compatibility was made by Ensoniq. Creative bought them out to get this technology.
First decent 3D soundcards were made by Aureal, which you already covered.
The chip in the SBLive was developed by EMU, which Creative bought out.
The Soundworks speakers had nothing to do with Creative until they bought them out.
The Aureal is still basically the same technology that's in the SBLive. I guess they ran out of innovative companies to buy out.
Unfortunately for Creative they can't exactly buy out Apple, so I'd say they're in trouble.
Ok, I used to be an Apple hater. I really didn't like the company, I didn't like the products, and I was sick and freakin tired of hearing that the iPod was the only good mp3 player in the world.
So, when I decided I wanted a portable hard drive and music player in one, I looked at everything EXCEPT the iPod. In fact, I flat out refused to buy an iPod. I looked at the iRiver, the iAudio, and the Creative Nomad. (does every player need an "i" in front of it?). And you know what happened? I couldn't find a single player that did the following: play music, mount as a USB mass storage device, and have an interface that didnt suck. They all either had a horrifyingly proprietary setup (needs drivers just to mount it as a drive), or they had an interface that was either crappy, or just plain cheap (I'm talking to you, iRiver).
Finally, my dad gave me an iPod for my birthday, and you know what? I couldn't find anything to whine about. It did everything I wanted it to do, and it's engineered really well, and it was smaller, to boot. It even made me have an open mind, and I've come to respect Apple products. What I'm trying to say is, yeah, the iPod isn't the only player on the market, and even I'm sick of hearing about it, but for god's sake, somebody, PLEASE, make an alternative that just plays music and acts as a hard drive. Is that too much to ask?
-Jay