It looks like Microsoft is going full guns against Apple and the iPod. They plan to pump literally billions of dollars into convincing that Zune is the way to go for a music player. They don't even plan to make a profit until maybe 2008. It is a similar strategy as the Xbox which has lost about 1.2 billion dollars to date. One interesting feature they are adding is software which will search your iPod for songs you bought on iTunes and give you the same songs in their format for free. That's one way to buy a customer. This eliminates the hinderance to switch because most of your music is in Apple's DRM format. Looks like there could be some serious competition since MS has huge sums of cash to work with.
Apple is going to have to introduce innovations at an even quicker pace to keep up with the cash barage. Hopefully MS will just be dumping money down the drain but you can never count them out. With that much money it could become interesting.
On another interesting note, have you seen the Apple patent which seems to describe a touchless screen which actually senses your finger hovering above the device. So no more fingerprints on the screen, and then the clickwheel can go away and make way for a bigger screen. This is the coolness factor which can give Apple the leg up on MS.
2 comments:
Stitch, are you sure that MS is preparing to pour Billions of dollars into this venture? So far I haven't heard a lot regarding the resources they're prepared to throw into the project.
By the way, we should note that Steve Jobs has been aware for quite some time that MS would introduce its own music player. He mentioned it in an interview a while ago. So it's no surprise to Apple management. It's just the public that's recently realized what MS was going to do.
I did see that patent from Apple, and it looks mighty cool! Steve Jobs recently said he has never seen products as cool as the ones currently in the pipeline! I know MS is a scary entity that buys its way (often) into new markets, but it's nice to know that Apple has already taken on behemoths like Sony already, and they're not about to take anything lying down!
The article that I saw actually said the "B" word, as in billions of dollars. This could be just over a billion like they have already poured into the Xbox. I guess they figure that since they have the most money to put up compared to competitors they are willing to practically give there products away, wipe out the competition, and then after their is no competition, rake in the profits. The Japanese use to do this with electronics products in the late 70's and early 80's. It was called "dumping" which was later made illegal. It was obviously a way to wipe out smaller competition by not competing on a level playing field.
I am sure Apple is working on some really cool products that will most likely come out just before Christmas. But Jobs always talks everything up so you need to put things in perspective. Every so often they do just Wow you with something totally unexpected. I hope that is the case this year. Especially since now they have even bigger research and development budgets than in the past.
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