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Creative Gunning For the iPod
yashchopra writes "CTZ is running an article where Creative's main goal in 2005 is to take away market shares from Apple's iPod music player, which they believe is very possible. The publication also have some information on the upcoming flash MP3 player standards that we will see this year. "While many companies are looking forward to their flash MP3 players, Creative has other plans. Creative was one of the most popular exhibitors on the show floor with their Zen Micro and Zen Touch players on display. Creative's sole goal this year is to take away some market shares from Apple's iPod. The company believes it to be a possible task, as iPod is limited to iTunes when it comes to purchasing music online and with Creative's products, you will be able to purchase music from major online vendors. The ability to download and listen music from any major online retailer and the price are what Creative is using as their marketing strategies to compete against Apple's iPod. But other than that, Creative's products look very much like the iPod with a few changes."
The ability to download and listen music from any major online retailer
Well, all of them except for *the* major online retailer that is.
I wish them luck. Competition is good.
Whenever anybody says their product is really similar to iPod or Tivo except for a few tiny differences, I can guarantee you what the differences are.
Usability, physical beauty, and simplicity.
News flash: those little things are the reason people are buying a an iPod, buying a Tivo, etc, and not your product, Creative. My girlfriend didn't want to carry around something that looked like an angry PDA, so I got her an iPod and she's happy, and her friends are buying them now. My parents didn't want a home media center computer in their living room because they can barely handle their current computer, so I got them a Tivo and they're happy, and their friends are buying them now.
Are there cheaper products out that do the same dang thing? Sure. But they're not as usable, not as attractive, and not as simple. And sorry, Creative, but putting a "Mesmerizing Blue LED Back Light" isn't going to cut it. Those were "Mesmerizing" back in 2002. You're not going to get money out of my pocket by looking like a rice-boy's Civic dashboard.
And as long as the Zen Micro has a blatant pair of nipples on the touchpad, my girlfriend's not going to use it either.
What's your damage, Heather?
Given that Apple has about 70% of the market for online music sales, aren't the others all "minor" if numerous?
iTunes GAINING market share every quarter
At best they can hope to slow the dominance!
The biggest most MAJOR retailer of songs is apple with over 70% of the market for sold files.
I hardly see how they can claim that they support "ANY major vendor" without supporting the DRM protected MPEG 2 AAC file format.
besides, apples the AUDIO in apple DRM is the most leightweight, and highest quality (48 frequency "bins' instead of 32, more amplitude, more upper frequ3encies) than mp3 and wma.
Digital Restriction Management sucks, but at least apple's is a little less hostile than microsoft's and Real's. (number of machines, phone-homes, number of allowed lost replacements, etc)
But back on point, Apple needs to stop these lock-in practices, they tried to do it in the early days of the desktop computer, and now they are again trying to do it now. And like the late 80's and early 90's Apple started out real strong, because they had an amazing product, but soon people realized that there is nothing out there for them when choosing Apple. I beleive you will see that in the next couple years with iPod.
If I have to decide between listening to you, and listening to the company that owns three quarters of the online music market and three quarters of the portable music player market, I think I'll listen to the company.
Your history is kind of wacky. Apple's heydey in the computer market was the early 80s with the Apple II line. The Apple II was always a very open platform. The Mac, on the other hand, never owned a huge part of the market. The late 80s and early 90s were decent for Apple, but they never had anything like the kind of position that the iPod has. They never started out strong with a closed platform and got stomped, so I don't see how the iPod would mirror anything else they've done.
Maybe you're right and people want "open" hardware. Two things come to mind, though. The first is, how are any of the competitors any more "open" than the iPod? They all let you play raw MP3s that you can get from anywhere. The iPod lets you buy from iTMS and nowhere else that has DRM, the others let you buy from other places but not iTMS. Is being locked in to a handful of minor players less grievous than being locked in to a single major player? They all have DRM, they all restrict what you can do, and none of them will work with an arbitrary music player.
The second thing that comes to mind is this: 400,000 people a week would seem to disagree with your assertion. Maybe you're right and they'll change their minds, but so far I don't see any evidence.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Why do you think they made the iPod Shuffle ?
It's cheap enough to please most joggers.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"All Creative need to do is add Bluetooth"
And hundreds can watch the thermometer bar crawl across while transferring data at really low speed.
This got modded insightful by people who've heard of Bluetooth but never used it.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
You know what's enough to keep me away from any Creative MP3 player? The fact that they come with a whole 90 days of warranty on them. And that I know two different people in the past year who bought 30GB Zens and had the hard drive in them die within 6 months only to have Creative tell them they were out of luck.
This compared to a full year of AppleCare with less a week's turnaround time if I have problems? I'll pay extra for the piece of mind, thank you. Nevermind that Apple, while not perfect, is a company I'd far prefer to support than Creative.
If that's left you scratching your head, do some research on Creative's driver support for their hardware, the demise of Aureal (and what happened to Aureal's technology afterward), and the patent blackmailing of iD re: Doom 3 and EAX support. The less money I give Creative, the better I feel.
While I agree that competition in the portable mp3 player market is a good thing, I think Creative's a non-starter.
They win on price, I'll give you that. If you run down the features list of a Nomad vs. an iPod, the Nomad looks good, has a slightly bigger disk, and is $100 cheaper. Sure, it might be the size of a paperback instead of the size of a pack of cigarettes, but good design isn't necessarily worth $100 to most people. As long as you can plug the thing into your computer and get down to the business of cataloging and playing back music, then it should be fine.
Here's Creative's first Achilles heel. Where iTunes is simple and intuitive, Creative's software is terrible. I say this to you as a fellow user of open source software, where function often takes precedence over form: Their software SUCKS. It is hands-down the one of the worst applications that I have ever used. Where iTunes gets out of the way, Creative's application stands in front of you like a bouncer, arms crossed, giving you that look that says you're not cool enough to come in here. Moving songs and files to and from your Nomad is an unbelievably tedious chore. Eventually, frustrated and tired, I tried to use Windows Media Player to transfer music to my device. That's how bad. Add to that the constant upsell involved in using a new Nomad. Many Nomads come with a lot of encrypted music already on disk, just waiting for you to enter your credit card number and unlock it. Removing these songs to get your disk space back is frustrating, and being asked to shell out more money after you've just spent hundreds is insulting.
Fortunately, (pimping time) Red Chair Software has come to the rescue in this regard. With their NotMad software, using the Nomad stops sucking. Further, they license per-player, not per-copy, so you can synch multiple PCs against your player on the same license, something Apple can't do.
This is how incredibly bad Creative's Nomad software is: There's a company doing brisk business selling aftermarket replacements for it. You don't see anyone even trying to do the same for iTunes.
Fortunately, NotMad is pretty cheap at $30. So now with your Nomad, you're only saving $70 over the iPod.
Still, that's $70 put to other uses, until the Nomad breaks (and it will). Anecdotal research, while certainly not definitive, seems to show a very high failure rate for Nomads. Certainly my room-mate's broke inside of a year (the headphone jack has become de-soldered from the board). Learn from his mistake, and make sure you buy the extended warranty. That's another $30, bringing your total cost savings down to $40.
So now your total savings for a Nomad are about $40 over a comparable iPod. For $40, you may as well just get the market leader. Until Creative can improve the reliability of their products, and write a good software package to go with their hardware, they're going to keep losing.
Frankly, that's fine by me.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
The ipod works with lots of download sites. I have an ipod, I don't buy from itunes. I download a lot of legal tunes. I have used emusic, disclogic, mindawn, magnatune, digitalsoundboard.net, studiodownloads.net, livephish.com, primuslive, live metallica.com, and some others I am probably forgetting. If none of these places have the music I want, I just order the cd for usually less than $12 new or $8 used. (which usually winds up being cheaper than most of the download sites especially when you include buring and labelling cds) The "doesn't work with any major retailer" complaint seems to mean "doesn't work with windows media drm".
On the other hand market research seems to indicate that people do not want to own music, they simply want to rent it, by paying a subscription service and using the new windows media drm to allow subsription services to be used on portable players. If this is so, it will give M$ another monopoly and Apple will be screwed. I want to own all my music, the rest is radio. Rental is probably the music industry's dream scheme, they can sell you the same music over and over in perpetuity without having to come up with anything new.
Another take on this issue is that MP3 players have had the slowest and least market penetration (15% of households - Forbes) of any major consumer electronics product. So maybe this is not the wave of the future... maybe we don't know what's coming at all.
The ideal situation would be hundreds of these little sites popping up so that no one site has a huge selection, but you can get what you want somewhere with no drm. Lots of competition, good for everybody. Certainly successful bands could all make there own sites (Metallica, Phish, Primus) and screw the record companies now. Even some smaller bands are making a living with their own sites. This would also be the best situation for the ipod. Buy lossless music and then pick your own format, don't let someone pick it for you.