“No matter how you slice it, Apple is a major player in the consumer electronics industry. Its influence is far larger than its sales volume in a single product category, even if it won’t be attending International CES this week,” Doug Olenick writes for TWICE. “Since the 2003 holiday season, Apple has sold in excess of 21 million iPods of various types, with 6.4 million of those sales having taken place during the company’s third quarter, which ended Sept. 25, 2005. In addition, Apple has sold several hundred million music downloads during the same period from its iTunes music library.”
“This level of success is enabling Apple to do what it does best — march to the beat of its own drummer. However, it would be a mistake to interpret Apple’s absence from CES as something negative. Every major CE and PC supplier exhibiting at CES has had to figure out a response to the iPod, while hundreds of others have simply jumped onto the iPod bandwagon and rolled out a mountain of accessories for the portable music players.. More insight into its plans may come at its MacWorld conference to be held in San Francisco Jan. 9-13. (Apple did not respond to numerous requests to contribute to this article),” Olenick writes. “‘Apple is dominating the MP3 arena by design and product and many companies are trying to emulate them,’ said Ahron Schachter, VP/general manager of New York-based RCS Computer Experience. This imitation is only partially successful, Schachter said, because other portable audio vendors simply do not pull along the rest of the industry like Apple. ‘The minute Apple has a new iPod, there are eight companies that come out with accessories. This does not happen with other companies — they wait to see if the product sells first,’ he said.”
“The potential is very strong for Apple — with its demonstrated ability to dominate a CE category — or any other IT company like Dell or Hewlett-Packard that have taken big chances in select CE categories, to further penetrate what are now solid CE categories. This is primarily because IT companies are much better at integrating their technology into CE products than CE companies are at incorporating computer technology into their own products,” Olenick writes. “‘The CE guys still can’t figure out how to integrate IT. They really can’t think outside the box, and this is really their big weakness and Apple exploited this weakness,’ Baker said. Schachter supported this, adding that even Sony, which formerly was very pro-active in portable music, has stopped to watch what Apple is doing with color and price.”
Full article here.
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