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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."
Well there already are phones that play MP3s, it's just that nobody wants one. I don't want to have to worry about missing a phone call because my cellphone ran out of batteries while I was listening to a Red Dwarf audio book. Until Microsoft starts making Tricorders count me out.
/sarcasm
But I'm sure Apple would be fools not to follow Gates' prediction, after all Microsoft is the leader in innovation.
That's a safe bet...if the IPod remains as it is. There's no chance that the IPod won't morph into something else in the future...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Yea, and that cell phone will be made by Apple
Yeah, it sounds a bit ridiculous, but think about it. People don't like carrying around multiple devices with them, and out of all the portable devices out there, the only one that has emerged as a necessity is the cellphone. These days, most cellphones you can buy have most of the features of the PDAs of yore. Listening to music is a fairly small feature to add to a device.
If you look at Nokia's cell phones, about half of them have cameras. A few years ago, a camera phone would've been pretty rare. I think that's where things are heading with hard drive cell phones, and once you have a hard drive, playing music off of it is pretty simple. Sure, the iPod is fairly entrenched as of right now, but when people's iPods break, they'll already have a device that can play music, making another iPod purchase much less lucrative. As more iPods break than get replaced, these Windows Mobile phones will be waiting to take the MP3 player market away.
If my windows mobile phone didn't continually crash. Every couple of days the Windows Mobile OS crashes and it won't recognize any button presses. This is particularly annoying as it usually happens when answering calls, and requires pulling the battery out to hard resetting the phone. I originally got the phone because everybody in my office was getting them, and so I didn't have much of a choice. I was skeptical about running Microsoft anything, but I thought, "Hey: Different OS, Different Codebase, maybe it won't be filled with bugs!" Boy, was I wrong!
Person Y says technology by company X won't last.
Instead, person Y believes technology made by person Y's company will win long-term!
Well, I am running 640k of RAM just fine, you insensitive clod!
They can see the end of Windows and Office steaming towards them from a mile off and they want to be able to step aside before it hits them hard.
Deleted
Gates was saying everyone would switch to Tablet PCs a while ago. I think they had a thing called Passport that was supposed to be wildly successful as well. They're always pushing high powered high priced things in the portable/PDA universe. But sometimes something small and simple (and reliable) like an iPod mini is preferable. It does one thing and does it well.
Actually, I was much more sure of this a few years ago than I am today. I say that because of 2 things.
... selling you expensive monthly service plans. The phones are just a means to an end for them, and you'll always see them crippling functionality if it allows them to charge extra for using a feature the way THEY want you to use it. Think "Jack of all trades, master of none." when you think "all in one cellphones". That's all you're gonna get.
1. Cellphone service still hasn't really come down much in price. Years ago, everyone seemed to think the emergence of more competing services would bring monthly charges way down, but it hasn't really worked out like that. Anyone can buy themselves a music player or even a PDA and get lots of use out of it, out of the box, without subscribing to anything. Cellphones, on the other hand, are useless paperweights as soon as you stop paying for monthly service. You can argue that cellphones are much more of a "necessity" - but that really depends on who YOU are. For quite a few people, they're just a convenience - as they could wait until they got home or to work to make/return their calls.
2. Cellphone makers have been horribly clueless in building a "convergence device" that really meets people's needs. Look at the latest "cream of the crop" PDA/camera/phones, for example. Take the Treo 650. Still so new, you can't even get on through many major carriers like Verizon, but if you do - you find out it's very fragile/breakable, not to mention still almost too large to carry around comfortably. Battery life could be better too, and as a portable music player, it doesn't hold a candle to something like even a first generation iPod. Meanwhile, like most all other camera phones, it takes lousy low-resolution photos. Where's the desirability in that??
I think the truth is, cellphone makers are really only interested in one thing
As to Ipods, whatever Apple's flaws, the marketing of the IPod has been a marvel to see. Apple has managed to brand themselves, and I don't think MS is going to be bashing into that market as easily as they think.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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 $20 or more a month to address the unlikelihood of it ever happening seems a little excessive."
She then got a cell phone call and ended the conversation.
Using 'PTunes' on my treo 600, I already bring 12 albums of music around and play them using an SD card... And I can play them on my desktop also if I want. As SD and other media get cheaper, this will get easier and easier. I also can listen to shoutcast streams. All that on a tiny little OS like Palm. Why should I worry about Windows on my handheld device when Palm works and will boot up in seconds.
The second thing I noticed in the article was this quote:
"The BlackBerry is great but we're bringing a new approach," he said. "With BlackBerry you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software."
With Chatter, I get IMAP email pushed in real time to my treo.No extra server needed here either, just a _standard_ IMAP server which supports IDLE, and my treo can get email pushed to it in the background.
> Gates' prediction that the Internet would be huge business was not wrong at all.
Um, no. Gates thought that the internet was a joke, not for the business user. M$ was very late coming out with a browser, because they had no interest until it was almost too late. They scrambled like mad to warp and mutate Mosaic into the non-standards complient bastard IE when it was obvious that the internet was not going away.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The trouble is that Gates assumes that everyone else is dumb and he's smart, so no matter what someone else has done, he can start with their ideas and improve upon it. He doesn't take into account that others are doing the same thing, and that by the time the MS version gets out the door the innovator has moved on.
Witness:
At least some journalists are taking notice:
Kevin Fox
What people seem to be forgetting is that service providers only want a phone with a music player if they can provide the music.
... Not that there is anything wrong with this, but he is not in it for the music.
Apple and Motorola have already had trouble finding takers for their iTunes capable phones because service providers want to sell music to the customer, rather than have them load it off of their computer. It doesn't gain them a whole lot if you can upload your own music.
Plus they are selling crappy ringtones for $3 or more, so can you imagine what would happen if they sold whole songs? They would have to lower their profitable ringtone price point, or sell songs for an outrageous amount, and I'm guessing on the latter assuming they only let you buy music from them. (And probably charge you for the internet access that you will have to use to browse for songs)
Service providers don't want you to have your own music. You hear people whine about iTunes music store, this would be Cingular Music store. $5 single songs at 64k that are DRM's to only your phone.
And as for Bill Gates, he doesn't care about the music player. He wants you to get the phone for the music player and then be tied to microsoft products to sync it. And since you'll also have Word on your phone, you'll need it on your computer... Excel, Outlook,
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
... if you think of it as a PDA with a built-in phone, which is how you should be looking at it, then there's nothing at all wrong with its size ...
And if you think of it as an anvil with a built-in phone, it's even better!