iPod Takes Japan by Storm

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the soaring popularity of the iPod in Japan. From the article: 'iPod mania is alive and well in Japan -- one of the most competitive consumer-electronics markets on the planet. Despite an array of well-entrenched Japanese rivals, such as Sony and Matsushita, the iPod had cornered 51.3% of the digital-music player market as of the end of 2005, up from about 32% in 2004, according to research firm BCN. Sony was a distant second with 16.2%, while Panasonic grabbed just 8.2% of the market.'"

Comments

I for one find this surprising...

[ShyGuy91284]

Japan is a culture that has been historically known for being very group centric, and supportive of the group which they are part of. Them choosing a foreign product over a local product is thus surprising to me. I assumed the fact that the XBox was foreign was the main reason it never took off in Japan. Then again, it was more or less a "PS2 without Japanese games" when you look at the big picture of consoles at the time, so that may be he reason for it's bad sales. I'm guessing the popularity of the iPod is due to the younger generation breaking off from the ideals of the older generation, and willing to buy an interesting product even if it is foreign. Even today Japan is going through big changes in terms of the position of women in society and external influence.

Re:I for one find this surprising...

[Otter]

There are plenty of extremely popular foreign brands in Japan, from low-end (McDonalds, Coca Cola) to luxury (Louis Vuitton, Prada). It's a tough market, but not at all unprecedented to break into.

iPod not Xbox 360

[hchaput]

Slightly off topic, but I wonder... Will this finally put an end to the theory that the Xbox 360 bombed in Japan because the Japanese are faithful to Sony? As if baseball wasn't proof enough of Japan's willingness (eagerness) to embrace western culture.

Maybe the trend here is that Japan doesn't like big, brawny electronics. Perhaps they like simple, cute, almost frivolous electronics. Less is more!

Re:iPod not Xbox 360

[fermion]

This thread has both the MS apologist and the denegrating comments stating Apple is just a fashion with little technical competence.

The reality is likely to be more complex. There is almost always a nationalistic pride for localy produced products. And even though almost all electronics are produced in Asia, the branding issue is still very real. But at the heart a good product can always compete, and a good product is not just about fashion, but also the amount of money a person is willing to pay for the product.

For instance a real Prada bag will last a lifetime, while the cheap nylon ones will start to shread quickly. It may not be worth $400 dollars to you to own such a bag, but the quality difference is real. There was a story of Enzo Ferrari that was totaled in the Malibu accident. Car cost 1.2 million. The driver hit at 150+ miles per hour and the occupant(s) suvived. The car was not just about a name. One pays for safety.

So stating the issue is just about style, or just about nationality is a cop out. Sure, to compete in another country one has to be much better, but one can always build a better mousetrap. of course it is easier to just build the same old crap and then complain, but that is not the issue. The iPod is a well made product that has been able to compete. The xBox does not really have anything the consumer finds compelling, and mostly succeeds in the US because it is MS, an name that Americans trust. OTOH, I do not see the powerbooks competing in Japan because the Sony laptops are by many measures better machines. This is reality. Complaining that the Japanese are not buying Powerbooks when Apple is not competing with Sony, at least on that level, would be silly.

Re:I'm confused

[Gulthek]

Japanese do exhibit nationalistic pride (it's not racism).

It actually is, in many cases. Japanese culture is pretty well steeped with homogeneitic inclinations. "Polluted" people are discriminated against in many areas of life. Read up on the "burakumin."

Re:One way to look at it

[SithLordOfLanc]

That statement would imply that they once had an 80% market share in Japan. It seems that the article is suggesting that the market share in increasing.

I guess I still don't get it

[foreverdisillusioned]

Why does your average MP3 player need to be more intuitive? My Rave MP has up and down arrows instead of a virtual scroll wheel. The latter may be somewhat cooler, but it's not any more efficient. You can operate it just as fast, just as easily, with one hand. You have playlists, shuffle, etc. Fast forwarding through a song is as simple as--get this--holding down the fast forward/skip button. I use folders to organize my songs, and transfering them to the Rave is as easy as plugging it in and dragging and dropping from Windows Explorer (or more frequently, Nautilus. It auto-mounts just fine in Ubuntu.) Not having to run any extra client software at all is what I consider "integration." And not only did it cost me well over $50 less than the equivalent iPod, it had features that the iPod lacked, like a digital FM tuner, the ability to record songs off of radio, and a built-in microphone for voice memos. And finally, looks: It's a deep cherry red and roundish instead of pure white and squarish. So? It looks just fine and even if you hated the color you could easily hide it in a shirt or pants pocket.

Props to the Apple marketing department. Props to whomever put together the iTunes store. Props to whomever put together such a slick, minimalistic package and make it popular. I'm not knocking the iPod in any way, I'm just sick of people trying to convince me that all other MP3 players are ugly and nigh impossible to use. I select the folder (or the playlist), I select shuffle, I hit play--what can possibly be simpler than that? I drag and drop from the file manager I *already use* to organize my music--what proprietary client feature could make it easier than that?

What could possibly be worth an extra $50? I'm not going to pay it for the brand name just so I can impress my friends. I'm not going to pay it for an interface that's no more intuitive than scroll arrows. I'm not going to pay it for the software that cannot run natively in Linux and eats up more memory/CPU than Explorer alone in Windows. And I'm damn sure not going to pay it just for the white paint job.

I'm not trolling, I just genuinely don't get it. All the "features" that make the iPod so superior are either already present on many (most?) other MP3 players or just a matter of taste (white and square design vs. roundish and colored.)

Re: I guess I still don't get it

[gidds]

I'll try to explain. (I probably won't do a very good job of it, but hey, no-one else has tried yet :)

Where the iPod scores isn't in big features. It doesn't have a tick-list of big features to impress you, like other gadgets do (Sony's, especially). Where it does score is in lots and lots of really little things that individually sound stupid or not worth bothering about, but collectively add up to a really great experience. That's Apple's way of doing things, from their Mac hardware and software down, and that's why people love them; the "It Just Works" motto is a good description. Their stuff doesn't get in the way, it doesn't try to impress you, it just does what you want it to as easily as possible.

I'll try to address your individual points, but I suspect that the answers won't mean much unless you actually use an iPod, preferably for a week or two.

The scroll wheel: the big advantage here is that you're controlling how fast the selection moves, not just in which direction. Even though my albums list has a thousand or so entries, I can zip really quickly down to the approximate area, then slow down, and zero in on the right one. Sure, you can do that with arrows or buttons or whatever, but the scroll wheel is that much faster, more controllable, more intuitive.

It's similar for fast-forwarding. On the iPod, you can hold down the forward or backward buttons just like on any other device. But you can also (after pressing the centre button) use the scroll wheel, which again is great for zipping straight to one particular part of the song, especially if it's a long one or you want fine control.

As to the software, I know iTunes isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the integration is really good. I've told it to sync a couple of playlists, so every time I plug in my iPod, iTunes fires up and syncs. No user action needed at all; it transfers any new songs to the iPod, removes any no longer in the playlist, updates play counts and times for songs you've played on either machine, copies to the iPod any edits you've done to track names or other data -- as I said, It Just Works.

I don't have another current MP3 player, so I can't compare directly, but maybe a comparison with my MD player would help. The MD player has a 'play' button, a 'stop' button, a 'mode' button, an 'edit' button, a 'disp' button, a 'rec' button, and two paddles which move up/down/in marked 'vol+/-/bass' and '>>/<</entersync', and each of these has several different functions depending which mode it's in. Some of them must be pushed several times to cycle through the different options; some must be held down for several seconds; some must be used in combination. In short, it's a pain to use. I learned how do do all I wanted to, but it was never easy, and I'd still forget some of the more advanced stuff. And while it's manageable for a single MD, I dread to think how it'd scale up to a HD full of music.

The iPod, OTOH, has only five buttons and one slider, and they do one or at most two things. And the interface is completely different: instead of umpteen different pages and modes, with all of the buttons having completely different functions in each, there's a menu structure. One single menu structure. Wherever you are in the menu, the wheel and the buttons do exactly the same thing. You can always see where you are in relation to everything else, and there's practically nothing to learn. (I first used an iPod in a shop for about two minutes, and on my own completely figured it all out.) It's childishly simple.

As I said, this won't sound like a big advantage, but once you've used it, anything else seems like hard work. The beauty of it is that you don't need to think about it; you just do what you want to do, and can keep thinking about your music or whatever. 'Simplicity' will never be a feature people put on their ticklists for new gadgets, nor will it be an advertising point for anything in the technology world, b

Re: I guess I still don't get it

[gidds]

PS...

It's just struck me that the Apple philosophy (do one thing and do it well) is rather like the Unix philosophy (where each command does just one thing and does it well). As contrasted with that of most other gadgets (try to do everything), which you might consider more similar to another OS entirely...

...because you haven't tried it?

[TCQuad]

My Rave MP has up and down arrows instead of a virtual scroll wheel. The latter may be somewhat cooler, but it's not any more efficient.

When you want to scroll down faster to get to the bottom of your list, how do you do that? Can you hold the button down harder?

The beauty of the scroll wheel is I can go faster or slower or many subtle degrees in between depending on how fast I move my thumb around.

Re:Drop the hate

[Phroggy]

That's precisely the same reason I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books.