The Latest iPod Assassination Attempt

Insani-CTO writes "David Pogue at the New York Times reviews Samsung's new Z5, the latest attempt at an 'iPod killer' He gives it a pretty favorable review, though doesn't quite count the Nano as dead quite yet. From the piece: 'The Z5, then, will not cause any discernible dip in iPod market share. It does, however, deserve to be a hit for Samsung. For someone who wants a Nano that's not a Nano, it's a close enough match in looks, sleekness, capacity and crystal-clear software design. In fact, if iPod didn't loom over every conversation as the screamingly obvious point of comparison, the Z5 could be the next little thing.'"

Comments

Re:Dinosaur Killer?

[noewun]

The ipod (like this device) was an incremental improvement over other mp3 players from the time, not revolutionary.

Actually, the iPod was an enormous improvement over the mp3 players which came before, because it combined three features which had not yet come together: form factor, storage capacity and ease of use. There were small players, but they had limited storage capacity. There were players with lots of storage, but they were large and heavy. An no other player had an easy-to-use interface. From my limited experience (i.e., I have played around with other mp3 players but have not undertaken a serious study of them) no other manufacturer has yet produced as elegant an interface as has Apple.

I think the comment above points out one of Slashdot's enduring biases and explains one of the reasons Slashdot as a whole has such a terrible track record in predicting success of failure of things like the iPod. The focus here is on technology and techno-fetishism, something the vast majority of the buying public doesn't care about. To that end, saying that the iPod was only an incremental improvement over previous players is pedantic. One may only say that if one only takes into account the hard tech itself. To do that one must ignore the very important things which often mark the difference between successful and unsuccessful products, namely the ability to take techology and make it availble to Joe and Jane Computer User. This is the genius of iTunes and the iPod: it makes the process of buying, burning and managing digital music and an mp3 player easy for even the most technologically ignorant person.

Such an ability often gets short shrift in the Slashdot and wider geek world, which has its own macho posturing built around how deep one can get into a command line or a kernel. But, while doing that, one must remember that, like any subculture, the values of that subculture are not the values of the wider society. The fact that the iPod doesn't play Ogg Vorbis files, while cause for concern here, is of absolutely no value in the wider consumer world. The fact that the iPod's tech wasn't very different from pervious mp3 players is equally unimportant: the iPod packaged what was there, along with a few improvements, in such a way that it was now easy for anyone to have an mp3 player. That is Apple's huge achievement, and that is what Apple understands better than almost any other computer or consumer electronics manufacturer.

If someone wants to beat Apple at this game, they are going to have to offer a better complete package than Apple, and I do not see that happening any time soon. Microsoft can't do it, because it isn't their focus: they've almost become a technology services company which happens to sell an operating system. The Sony of twenty years ago could do it, but that is very definitely not the Sony of today. Samsung can't do it, because they only offer, at most, one third of the player/store/software combination. if anyone is to knock the iPod off its throne, I think it will be Apple, when they introduce the next generation of iPod/video iPod/whatever they're planning.