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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.'"
Popular technology popular. Interesting....
That's payback for the whole Walkman thing back in the 80's !
... and I saw a LOT of people wearing iPods in the trains, walking on the streets, and at the Narita airport. I talked with a few people about the iPod, and most were using them for Japanese pop music ripped from CDs: I did not meet anyone who had used the iTunes store.
Further, most of the models I saw were the video iPod or the Nano. Very few older photo iPods, and none of the earlier generations.
I'd say that the iPod was the dominant music player that I saw (although there were a few portable CD players)
Until I owned one.
I've owned at least 6 or 7 different non-IPOD players including RIO's, RCA's, hard drive, flash based, you name it.
My wife bought me a Video Ipod this year and I was skeptical. "Why not save the $50 and get a non-Apple one.". After less than 3 months, I like it so well, I'm ready to trade her Rio Carbon in for a Nano just because its so easy to use. I generally consider myself tech savy (using Linux since 1997) but the interface just seems so slick, so smooth, so simple to use with one hand that I can't get over it. Just the fact that you can rate songs as you play them and have that transferred back into Itunes seemed to represent a higher level of integration (seamlessness) than I saw with any other player and client-side software combination.
Want to fast forward though a song? No problem. Couple of intuitive ways to do it. Love the album art. I used to download podcasts with a non-Itunes client and download to my other players. Completely simple with Itunes and the Ipod.
I'm not suprised. Apple just got it right.
a 'real' iPod killer
Here's one for only $7.
Just wait until Godzilla gets back from his battle with Mothra.
It'll beat back this iPod invasion.
Maybe the trend here is that Japan doesn't like big, brawny electronics. Perhaps they like simple, cute, almost frivolous electronics. Less is more!
XBox-Fanboys constantly claim that these evil Japanese racists only buy Japanese products.
How is that possible?
Japanese do exhibit nationalistic pride (it's not racism). It's similar to how many Americans will only buy American cars and trucks.
iPod style manages overcome the bias, because it is more stylish (which is important to teenagers) than other products. It's cool to own [and wear] an iPod so whether or not it was made in Japan doesn't matter.
X-box does not share such a cool factor, it's an equivalent to PS2, so nationalism becomes the deciding factor.
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Now we need a Naruto SE with all episodes loaded. My kids would NEVER speak out loud again.
Looks like captain obvious feels mightly insightful today.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
War was beginning. ....
Japan: What happen?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the iPod.
Operator: We get signal.
Japan: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Japan: It's You !!
Apple: How are you gentlemen !!
Apple: All your mp3 player are belong to us.
Apple: You are on the way to destruction.
Japan: What you say !!
Apple: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Apple: HA HA HA HA
Japan: Take off every 'wma' !!
Japan: You know what you doing.
Japan: Move 'wma'.
Japan: For great justice.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
Is anyone but Lada actually behind American automotive companies?
Hell, I'm not even sure Lada's still behind.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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.
It's not about the general features, all massive storage media players have these, it's about the small things.
A lot of companies try to improve a product by %100 by adding one new feature, but the iPod improves 100 of the existing features by %1.
This is what makes it so good, the small things, and so forth. Plus the simplistic design and so on. Buttons are annoying to use and hard on fingers, and more importantly hard to use in pockets. So, the add the click wheel where all you have to do is turn it a little bit to do whatever it will do.
It's the small things, the amount of effort put into perfecting these devices and the ease of use on the UI that makes them so great.
It's a good product, and on top of that, iPods are a recognizable name so they are consumers' first choice. Just like how the WalkMans were popular in the '80s, iPods have taken that place.
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...
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