Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates: Cellphone will Beat iPod
93,000 writes "CNN is running an article featuring Gates' prediction that the iPod is on the way out. From the article: 'As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run.' His prediction for a successor? Mobile phones-- powered by none other than Windows Mobile 5.0, of course."
I guess that would also include all other forms of portable devices. Cigarette lighters replaced by cell phones, ink pens replaced by cell phones, watches replace by cell phones, etc.
All powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0.
Has anyone ever done any reseach on how often Bill Gates has been right in his predictions?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
What is it with you Bill Gates? Why do you always have to "beat" beat everybody? The history of Mr. Gates is filled with prognostications about how Microsoft with win this and win that and how competitors don't have any idea of what is happening. Rah, rah, rah! Certainly much of this is marketing, but I much prefer companies that just keep their heads down creating the next big thing and then announcing it to everyones surprise. Pre-announcing products by years only serves to generate expectations that more often than not are unmet. Longhorn is how far out of the initial expected delivery date?
Now, as far as his bets on the future of the iPod, like just about everything else Apple has created and Microsoft has copied, the iPod is not stagnant. It's development is ongoing and dynamic, so Microsoft is going to have not not only copy, but out innovate a moving target.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Yea, and that cell phone will be made by Apple
I've often worried about the entire Apple product line in this sense.
If you look at how much design work they've put into their products, you can't help feeling that at some point soon, they're going to end up with the ideal solution. And at about that point, you suddenly have a major problem; stagnation of the product range, or change for the sake of change.
The iMac is a good example; where exactly do you go from an all in one LCD? Same with the iPod. It plays music, and it plays it really well. How do you improve on it without making it more complex, or adding features some users would find redundant? Or do you simply make cosmetic changes now and again to keep it fresh?
Heh, but on the same token Nokia also tried to combine a portable game machine and failed miserably...twice. They just couldn't get the cell phone to be as good as the relatively primitive gameboy advance, and they had trouble cramming all that functionality into a still usable interface. Cell phones did cannibalize the PDA market, but I think that can be attributed to the fact that there was so much overlap. You are naturally going to want your contact info on your phone for when you call people. However is listening to music a function of your phone?
It's all really going to come down to interface and battery life. If cell phone makers can cram all this functionality into phones without creating an unusable interface or sacraficing battery life then they may very well win the war. But it's really time to wait and see.
Monstar L
Actually I can see a convergence that makes sense. If you combine your cellphone/music player with a high speed network you could have a HUGE amount of audio and video files at your disposal. You buy the songs you want and you can then stream them over the network or copy them to memory. Same with video or TV broadcasts. But running Windows... Yeck. Palm is going to Linux I can hardly wait to see how that works out.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Err... Look at the fashion and / or furniture industry recently? As computers get cheaper and cheaper, and their insides / forms get easier and easier to design, there will be cooler looking / designed computers and accessories. The iPod is white because white's non-threatening and people are now generally scared of computers, but in the future there will be many, many other designs....
It's just the beginning of a move from Computers as Tools to Computers as Appliances... Consumer Electronics are going to get cooler and cooler just like they have been for the last twenty years, Apple just raised the bar a bit.
My little site.
Hear, hear.
Maybe five years ago, when cell phone popularity was just building up, a woman came up to me on the street and asked me if I wanted a free phone. I told her that I wasn't interested. When she stopped looking at me as if I was mentally deficient, she asked me why.
I replied, "I just don't want to be that accessible. I don't even like to answer the phone when I'm home half the time."
She proceeded, for several seconds, to glare at me as if she had just met the most incomprehensibly retarded person that she had had the pleasure of encountering in her entire life.
She then gave me the spiel about how useful a cell phone would be if I was ever to find myself stranded on the side of the road, my car refusing to start, in the cold Canadian winter.
My response? "In the 22 years I've been alive, I've never found myself in that situation. Paying $20 or more a month to address the unlikelihood of it ever happening seems a little excessive."
She then got a cell phone call and ended the conversation.
So who *is* actually building Windows phones in quantity? Well HP is.. a little tiny bit, but most of the world's Windows phones are manufacturerd by HTC of Taiwan and then just rebadged. Sure.. HTC is doing well, and the HTC Universal certainly rocks.. when it eventually comes out. But for all the squillions that Microsoft has put into this project, they haven't seen an awful lot come out.
Oh yes.. the iPod. Well, on one part we have these "jack of all trades" devices that have a so-so camera, music player, phone and PDA built into one. There's a market for "unified devices". There's also a market for focussed devices that are of a better quality. There's a market for both. Don't forget that Microsoft has been failing to kill off Apple for over twenty years too..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Using 'PTunes' on my treo 600, I already bring 12 albums of music around and play them using an SD card... And I can play them on my desktop also if I want. As SD and other media get cheaper, this will get easier and easier. I also can listen to shoutcast streams. All that on a tiny little OS like Palm. Why should I worry about Windows on my handheld device when Palm works and will boot up in seconds.
The second thing I noticed in the article was this quote:
"The BlackBerry is great but we're bringing a new approach," he said. "With BlackBerry you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software."
With Chatter, I get IMAP email pushed in real time to my treo.No extra server needed here either, just a _standard_ IMAP server which supports IDLE, and my treo can get email pushed to it in the background.
It's not about Apple or Microsoft or Samsung or Sony or anything to do with design or branding.
The one thing that will set a huge fire on wireless devices will be fast and very cheap networking. Hopefully WiFly will do it. But if not there's other possibilities. It's just a matter of time.
When it does arrive, say like 1Meg bidirectional for twenty bucks a month, everybody will have one and they'll just stream all of their media from their home PC.
But at that point the margins will be too low for either Apple or Microsoft. Instead, the handsets will probably have your telco's logo and be made by the zillion by Golden Gragon Ltd contract mega manufacturers, Shen Zhen China. They won't need more than a tiny bit of local storage since you'll keep everything at home. The rest of it wil just be a few chips and an antennae in a piece of plastic.
The best part is that they'll be all over India and Brazil and the Ukraine just as fast as they hit the US. Globalization isn't all bad.
I like Apple, but their products are too expensive.
Talk to an economist about the current pricing strategies at Apple. They'll tell you Apple is using smart pricing. If you are producing at 100% of your capacity and you are selling everything you make, then your MBAs will tell you that your prices are too low. Raise prices until sales drop to just below your peak production capacity.
As proof, Apple created and dominated the hard-drive MP3 player market in short order with the iPod at the price they chose. Maybe you don't own one, but millions of other people do. You are in the margin of consumers who rejected their pricing and I think Apple is fine with that because this margin represents a smaller loss in potential profit than if they lowered prices to convert you to a customer and then those other millions of sales would have netted a smaller revenue. I know that was a monstorously run-on sentence-- please forgive my inability to communicate this concept. I'm listening to my iPod while I type this.
seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!