Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying
“That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
In relation to a question about the danger of the iPod declining in popularity because of its very ubiquity.
What Steve failed to say was that the iPod will decline because of the rise of the mobile phone MP3 player.
Apple will release its third quarter earnings in a few hours. My call is that it’ll show the third consecutive quarterly fall in iPod sales. And furthermore, the decline won’t be because of a fall in iPod’s market share of stand alone MP3 players, but due to the overall decline in the market AKA the rise in sales of MP3 phones.
Sorry, you Mac Fan Boys, but the iPod is a terminal patient in any mass market sense.
I bet people will start reading your blog now that you have thrown a torpedo at Apple!
whoa d00d.
were *you* off.
shares up 5 bucks after-hours, beat the street, and sales up.
that has to hurt.
Time to eat your words!
I thougth this too, until I used the Verizon and Sprint handset music solutions. Apple took the market because of good product design and understanding the need for offering content in an intelligent way. Mobile phone companies (at least the ones I’ve been watching) today are nowhere close to creating a reasonable user experience. Will they evolve to create wonderful products? I’ve seen no evidence that they are capable of that kind of execution.
Well, yes, time to eat my words. But you have to stick your neck out sometimes
Having said that, iPod sales from last quarter were only 600,000 units up, worldwide which doesn’t seem such a spectacular increase to me - actually 7% from last quarter. So Apple’s great results can’t really be attributed to the iPod.
This isn’t Apple bashing, by the way. I love Apple gear and no one is more pleased than me to see Apple’s great progress in recent years. However, you can’t fight market forces and the iPod (and all the other stand alone MP3 players) is doomed, I’m afraid.
But this is a long term trend and there will false dawns like this along the way. Or maybe I am wrong, we’ll see.
Spencer - I agree with you in many instances, but the Walkman range is a pretty good user experience in my opinion. And they come with arguably the best ear buds available on any phone *or* MP3 player.
Russell
Russell,
Actually, the latest Economist has an excellent survey on telecom convergence that (for me at least) makes clear how unequipped telecom companies are (and will always be) for delivering compelling services of any kind.
This is not about music (or video, etc.). There are significant fundamental structural (cultural, economic) barriers within these companies that prevent them from doing something as obviously desirable as a mobile music service.
Steve Jobs would do it himself but as he has said (scathingly) before he doesn’t work well with “orifices”. Link: http://www.brianstorms.com/archives/000574.html and search in the piece for the word orifice.
Of course, Steve Jobs is busy constructing a shiney white orifice called iTunes, but I digress.
-Doug
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