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Microsoft To Release 'iPod Killer' at Christmas?
ShellFish writes "According to a report from Engadget, Microsoft is poised to finally take on the Apple iPod this holiday season. Tired of uninspiring offerings from its hardware partners, Microsoft is getting into the ring itself. The new media player from Microsoft will feature a bigger screen than the iPod Video, have built-in WiFi for downloading music without a PC, and Microsoft will work with music and TV content providers to build an iTunes Music Store competitor. In what may be the crucial competitive stroke, Microsoft will also allow you to download from its store any song that you've purchased from Apple, unlocking users from iPod's vendor lock-in."
In what may be the crucial competitive stroke, Microsoft will also allow you to download from its store any song that you've purchased from Apple, unlocking users from iPod's vendor lock-in."
I'll assume the summary leaves out the crucial word "free" in there. If so, that's pretty damn clever. I just wonder how/if MS will get the music cartels to agree to it, other than wholescale bombing of their headquarters' into submission by the Windows Air Force.
Personally, what sold me on the ipod compared to generics was the 60gb of space. I've already taken up half of that with my "favorite" music directory from PC and could probably fill up the rest easily if i sat down for a few days and cherry-picked some more stuff.
A wide library was extremely important to me. I like being able to go weeks without hearing a song again, and none of the other players I saw even came close in capacity. They need more jiggawatts.
Dear Troll,
MS's own DRM-crippled music files are proprietary.
iPod's can play plain ol' MP3s just fine. They do not require AAC.
Signed,
Fake-troll-hater hater
honestly out of the 8 macs I've bought over the last 5 years (I'm married to a geek, we don't buy one of anything)4 of those macs had major problems. I've never had an ipod have a hardware issue. I'm about as cynical as it gets over Apple hardware quality control too.
Never underestimate MS's understanding of the bribe, they will bribe the music companies to let them sell cheaper music with a promise to institute tiered pricing once they reach a certain marketshare. They will bribe their customers by giving them cheap music at first then changing the pricing model once the customers are "hooked" (the first one is free paradigm). They will bribe the hardware manufacturers to exclusively build parts for them. And I guarantee that after installing the first SP of 2007, iTunes will start behaving "badly".
Yes, that's all very well, but will it play my OGG files?
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Forgive me if I don't take a secondhand version of a college project where students interviewed students as a reliable report on what the general consumer wants in a Mp3 player.
These were part-tme MBA students (ie worknig professionals by day) who had taken statistics and maketing and were working under the supervision of a professor who has been hired by large corporation to do just such studies. Now this was a class project, not a corporate sponsord project, so it was small scale and regional (southern California) compared to an Apple sponsored study but it included interviews, questionaires, and focus groups. The results are not so easily dismissed. The sample size was significant, distributions, p-values, and other sanity checks on the data were good.
You object to students being the segment studied? Have you seen Apple's commercials? This is Apple's target market.
You fail to mention the players the iPod was compared to.
The survey covered needs, wants, perceptions, and customer satisfaction for whatever portable digital player were used. It was not an iPod study per se, iPod was just the most common player.
You say lack of AM/FM is seen as a negative. But is it a missing feature that would influence a significant amount of people's buying decisions?
It was a recurring missing "want". As stated in the original posts, the respondents said that they traded this want for the "status symbol" nature of the iPod.
"(*) I expect Apple has similar research of their own and it probably inspired the Radio Remote. I'd wager future models will have it built in." I'll take that bet. I don't think those things are flying off the shelves. Seems more like a specialty add-on for the small minority who want it to me.
The fact that Apple introduced such a product undermines your argument. If Apple's research showed it to be such a niche product they would have left it to third parties.
You fail to mention the iTunes factor. It's not all about the hardware. How did that figure into this survey?
They did not like being unable to transfer the files, a general DRM problem. MP3s were the preferred format.
[sidebar] iTune isn't really much of a factor anyways. I believe Jobs once stated that the average customer spent US$70. Not much of a lock-in, but that's a different thread (literally). [/sidebar]
I can't stress enough that I do not own an iPod, or care to.
I own one, 2nd generation, the first that were available for PCs. I happy with it.
I just hate to see know-it-alls throw around pointless and and arbitrary surveys like this as data we should all respect.
Really, from reading your post it seemed that you disliked the results and made many erroneous assumptions to rationalize why you should reject the data. As I pointed out it seems consistent with Apple's behavior with respect to radio. It's small scale and regional, but it was done by knowledgeable people under the supervision of experts.
So far, how many iPod killers has the iPod killed?