News Creative wants to squash an Apple

Creative come out guns blazing in an all out blitzkrieg against the almighty iPod. From the Inq:

CREATIVE, MANUFACTURERS of entertainment kit with headphones that go snap crackle and pop in buses and tubes throughout the world, has declared war on Apple's reassuringly expensive and very pretty iPod.

Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo told hacks in Singapore his company plans to spend US$100 million in 2005 in a marketing war aimed squarely at the Job's Mob's iPod. He said that the MP3 war has started and he was the one who has declared it.

"I'm planning to spend some serious money. I intend to out-market everyone," Hoo told Reuters. Creative have just released the Zen Micro, a 5GB portable music player, which will be the big gun in its hopes to displace Apple as the top seller of MP3 players worldwide by 2005.

Although Creative has no music service, it has the advantage that its product can play back Windows Media Audio (WMA) files sold by many of the iTunes Music Store's competitors.

L'inquage

 

sounds good, except for one problem:

the zen micro, and most other zen products, blow. i'm trying to be as objective as possible, here. don't think me an apple whore. i'm not. although their products are pretty decent.

 

Apple products have always been decent but their problem is how expensive they are. Their price really killed them in the normal user world so games weren't built for them since noone would be playing on them so that kept more people away. Price has always killed Apple but their products are nice.

 

This has never been the problem. Games were not built for Apple because they had such low market share. They had such low market share (in homes) because people wanted a platform at home that matched the platform at the office. x86 platforms were in offices because IBM made the first one out of off the shelf parts and then went around to businesses and said "... you can buy personal computers from a brand new company named after a fruit, or you can buy personal computers from us, International Business Machines..." or some such. Because IBM used off the shelf parts, anyone who could reverse engineer the bios and such could make a computer just like it that would run the same software. (Like HP did. Note - IBM never wanted this to happen, they never gave permission, they just never had the choice. Because Gates licensed the OS to IBM instead of selling the OS to them, they didn't own it, and Gates could license it to anyone else he wanted. And he did. That's why MS go huge instead of IBM over this whole thing.)

Anyway, long story short, the reason there are more games on the x86 platform is that it is the most common platform and is NOT because apple hardware is more expensive...

sorry

/end rant

 

Shame the Iriver doesn't have the money to blow on fancy ads as it kicks all the other players asses

 

It's a pretty good player. But it doesnt have the style or signature of an ipod.

 

Function over form

 

Well, the function is there in both.

Given more or less equal functions, unless there is a major difference in price, I would go form form+function.

 

Bingo. Drop the price on all their player $100 and a crapload more people (like me) would buy them. I can't justify paying that much for any Apple thing when I can get the equivalent player from someone else and lose a little wow factor. Like wow, you spent $500 on an iPod. You idiot, you.