“The iPod is doomed. Not this month, not this year, and maybe not the next. But soon enough, Apple will lose its hold on the marketplace for both digital-audio players and digital songs. It’s inevitable,” John J. Sviokla writes for Fast Company.
“Already the iPod’s features are being copied by Samsung, Dell, iRiver, Sony, and others. Competitors are adding tuners, cameras, gaming, and more to devices. They’re rolling out a host of new music services. Meanwhile, the iPod has not changed much since its debut four years ago — and Apple’s latest iteration, the iPod shuffle, has met with limited success. The competitors will win. Why? Because they have created an economic ecosystem that powers innovation. Apple hasn’t,” Sviokla writes.
“Apple should be opening up the iPod and licensing iTunes to others so they can build out the ecosystem. If it doesn’t, the iPod will lose, just as the brilliant Macintosh computer ceded market leadership years ago to IBM’s dowdier — but more accessible — personal computer. The iPod and iTunes, like any closed system, can give Apple outsized profits — but only for a time. Ultimately, no one company can out-innovate the market,” Sviokla writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Supposing that the market will remain stagant for 20 years is foolish. Apple’s iPod will change and evolve; it isn’t a Sony Walkman cassette player that stays virtually the same for 20 years. And the iPod isn’t the Mac, so stop trying to compare them. Also, please explain how the Apple iPod by HP (with 8% of the market, making it the number 2 digital media player) and the upcoming Motorola iTunes phone line constitute a closed system?
The Macintosh platform required and still requires huge investments by developers to create compatible software. So, when faced with budgetary contraints, they chose and still sometimes choose to go with the most popular platforms. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded, for very little cost, in any format the “developers” (musicians and labels) desire: AAC, MP3, WMA, etc. The music doesn’t need to be rewritten, recorded, and remastered. It’s like writing Photoshop once and then pressing a button to translate it for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. To draw an analogy between Mac OS licensing and the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship simply highlights the writer’s ignorance of the vast differences between the two business situations.
[UPDATE, 10:55pm: And, as “CDN guy” brings up below, what about the iPod economy of third-party accessory and peripheral makers? See related article below.]
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Report: Apple may be meeting goal of selling 1 million iPod shuffles per month – July 15, 2005
Apple’s iPod shuffle takes nearly 60 percent of US flash-player market in March – May 04, 2005
The iPod is not the Mac, so stop trying to compare them – August 13, 2004
Apple iPod owners spend millions on accessories, keep ‘iPod economy’ churning – March 04, 2005