| Microsoft XPOD: Apple and Sony's Worst Nightmare? |
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| Written by Laptop News | |
| Sunday, 12 February 2006 | |
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Here's another ghost device that may or may not even be in the works. It could simply be PR speak to scramble the CE industry, but heres what made the headlines recently: Microsoft is expected to launch a portable media device that will compete against Apple and dethrone the world's most popular MP3 player, the iPod. To add to the chaos, Microsoft will gun for Sony's PSP as well. Talk about a bold move on Microsoft's part.
While the software giant didnt comment on the feature set, it's made clear that it would not be another portable music player. On the contrary, it would play games, videos and music. The company also plans to leverage the XBOX brand name to better market the product. However, that would make it too gaming oriented and less of a music player, which could possibly take it away from its targeted competitor, the iPod. Will it succeed? Thats an entirely different story. The most important part of the strategy would be to not pitch it against the iPod at all. If it does, it will need to somehow make the iPod feel clumsy alongside Microsofts XPOD (let's call the non-existent device the XPOD for the purposes of this column). The reason I say this is because if you look in the market today, there are millions of iPods being sold every month. People have gone from simple upgrades to buying a player for each member of the family. The amusing part is that the iPod does little else beyond playing music. Yeah, sure it now does videos and photos, but Im talking more in terms of functions that are almost standard on other similarly priced products such as Archos, Creative, Sony and iRiver players. All of these players offer far more functionality than the iPod, but have they been able to beat the world's most successful audio player? Not yet. |
