iPod! a product on shaky ground

I have always thought Apple's value play is rather weak for several reasons.

Up until recently, the iPod device is not much fancier than a Quartz display digital watch with a big hard drive. What Apple did really well was brand the iPod in such a way that it became as cool as any fad in the 70's. However fads erode quickly. Another reason the iPod has worked -before iPod's advent, people were not aware that MP3's were so easy to deal with or that they evev existed. Remember the CDR/WAV format has been around since the early 80's. That MP3 took another 12-15 years to get to the geek market is just plain surprising.

WinAMP and similar apps have been around for many, many years. All you really had to do was burn the MP3's to a CD-RW, and then play them on $30 MP3 compatible Walkman that you could easily plug into your car stereo via the cassette deck for another whopping $10. I traveled all over Scandinavia in 2001 with nearly 25 Miles Davis albums burned onto just 2 CD's. We had 10 other CD's and we never ran out of music in two weeks and thousands of miles of driving.

The reason why products like iTunes sell is that most people are simply not good at putting disparate components together. They do like going to Radio Shack. They get nervous about their ability to make things work for themselves. They want the package. They want the image. And if you give it to them, they will pay top dollar. That is, until they figure out that it really was just the Emperor's new clothes.

All it will take to dislodge iTunes from its resplendent position and to kill Apple's stock price is a consortium of other player manufacturers and software player vendors deriving an open standard file sync interface for allowing devices to talk to any software player and play all the file formats. This should take the right group of three geeks in a basement about 10 hours to create.

Much hullabaloo has been made of iPod's video capabilities and the advent of podcasted video. WHOOPEDOO. Over two years ago, Archos (http://www.archos.com/) already has the handheld video & music market for the PC's done. ,The devices supported every video standard, boasted humungous storage capacity, offered tight form factor, and a long battery life. What more could a gadget guy want?? You could use it to take your favorite shows to another location and plug into a TV and watch like a VCR. You could carry a healthy music library everywhere you went.



Archos currently lags in the market for two reasons.

Visibility and Image – Who has actually heard of it? It is buried on the bottom shelf at the retail stores. The sales people are not trained on it. The accessories are not present to purchase with the product at stores. And who has ever heard of the company to begin with? There has been no meaningful market, no superbowl ads, no buzz, and certainly no cool image factor. It is marketed the typical way Pac Rim manufacturers try to enter our market without a US OEM label, quietly and unnoticed by the cash spending masses.

Inept competitive positioning - One has to question the business acumen of Archos. They have products that directly compete in Apple’s iTunes space. Yet, Archos provides no support for Mac at all. The device could have replaced TiVo or the large component DVR’s that is directly competing the space with iTunes that does NOT make an attempt to support Mac OSX, but DOES have Linux support. Bewildering. (Yes, "I" could compile Linux support on my Mac, as I have installed all the necessary development add-ons (gigs and gigs worth) but your average guy will not be able.) Archos works great UNLESS you need to use it on a Mac. There are no useful software sync or video conversion apps between Archos and Mac.

Sony and all the other handheld gadget players out there have not stepped up and addressed this market. If any of them would bother to turn their juggernaut in the direction of iPod, we would witness a rapid dilution of the iPod space.

(Which leads us to the other question. Given that iPod serves as Apple’s way to familiarize people with other Apple products, given that Microsoft Windows still is god awful and buggy, and given that Apple is now porting it’s OS to Intel, the right course of action should be for Apple to simply sell it’s OS in shrink-wrap at Office Depot alongside Red Hat and XP such that anyone could install it to any Intel machine. However in Apple’s usual fashion, they are limiting this only to their own hardware. )