CW on RM: Microsoft's Latest So-Called iPod Killer

New Media Revolution Hit of the Day
07/06/2006 2:48 PM

So Microsoft "secretly" talks up how it can design an MP3 player that can challenge Apple. Again. (I put quotes around "secret" because the reports in the press such as The Wall Street Journal are full of "off the record" quotes. It seems Microsoft truly has a new public relations strategy that entails "leaking" details to the press to create buzz. I take that as an ironic but unsurprisingly transparent attempt to emulate Apple's PR strategies.)

The fact is that at some point, someone's going to design a player and system that will be functional enough to crack some of Apple's dominance. Microsoft is probably the leading candidate to do it, since Sony seems so clueless about its digital music strategy.

I think part of Sony's problem is that it owns too much valuable content and can't put a Chinese wall between the content ownership and the content distribution business models. Sony, like so many other content owners such as the music labels and movie studios, just can't seem to grasp that it has no control over what gets distributed where these days. The Internet has truly made the consumer king, and only Apple and Google (and smaller companies like YouTube.com) seem to have figured that out so far. Still.

I will also throw in here that I don't expect the new iPods (and possibly the new living-room media device that I've mentioned before) to hit until November of this year. But we can expect an all-out blitz from the folks in Cupertino, Calif., when it does.

Look forward to more hits like this; I'm going to start a new daily feature in this trading blog, highlighting a "digital revolution" story each day.