The success story of Apple’s iPod music player has impressed the whole sector. The Californian computer manufacturer has sold 22-million iPods since 2001, including 6,2-million of the music players in the last business quarter, corresponding to about 70% of the worldwide market.
Apple boss Steve Jobs recently presented the new iPod nano in San Francisco. It is just the size of five business cards laid on top of each other.
At the same time, Apple has moved into the cellphone market in collaboration with Motorola. While the Motorola ROKR is not the first music cellphone on the market, experts believe this combination of high-quality design telephone and the online-music-loading iTunes will soon displace its 70 rival models.
With his lucky streak, Jobs has so far been able to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft is competing with Apple on portable Windows Media Players, which will be offered by various hardware partners.
Furthermore, the world’s largest software concern is offering its own system for the management of copyright that is not compatible with Apple’s iTunes and which will be installed with different online music shops such as Musicload or OD2.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has repeatedly predicted that Apple’s success in entertainment electronics and in the music business will not last as Apple has opted for a closed system using its own hardware and software.
”I think you can draw parallels here with the computer: here, too, Apple was at first in an extremely strong position with its Macintosh and graphic possibilities — as with iPod today — and then let its position slip,” Gates said in a newspaper interview in May.
However, the trend change predicted by Gates is not in sight. In the United States and Britain, Apple’s iTunes music store dominates with a market share of about 80%. Only in Germany does T-Online with Musicload have the edge in the digital music business, a position that cannot be extended internationally.
As for digital music players, the predominantly Asian competitors are groaning under the market dominance of Apple and have been forced into permanent price cuts.
After the Japanese manufacturer D&M Holdings withdrew its Rio recently from the hotly contested MP3-player market, it is above all the South Korean Reigncom (iRiver) and Singapore’s Creative Technology (Nomad and Zen) that are left to challenge the over-powerful Apple.
It has, meanwhile, been acknowledged by Asian competitors that Apple’s success cannot be stemmed by price cuts alone. Moreover, extensive technical features, such as the back-up of the high-value open-source-format Ogg Vorbis, have not yet proved a compelling selling point.
Now the Asians are keen to concentrate more on design and hard-to-grasp criteria such as coolness. Nevertheless, Apple has raised the crossbar for the coolest MP3 player significantly with its new iPod nano. — Sapa-DPA