There have been loads of pretenders in the battle against the iPod. Nothing has made a dent. The Zune from Microsoft won’t.
But, I have a gut feeling that things could get exciting in the next 12 months.
Real Networks partnership with Sandisk with the release of the Sansa MP3player may be the first small threat.
Michael Parekh has a great post with all the links and details.
I love the SanDisk brand and products, but have ALWAYS been burned in component plays. Real Networks is a different story. Nobody is considering them, they get NO respect.
The stock is nowhere near an all-time high. It will never get there. If it keeps making small waves, it SHOULD get bought. I own the stock because if you knock out the “bubble years” the stock is really making significant highs (2001). I have posted on my ownership for a while. I want to be here just in case. I will be adding a little more next week.
Disclosure – Long Real Networks and Apple.
PS – Good post from Charlie about Music and Social networks and why Apple should buy last.fm. I hope Apple is reading and thinking this stuff through.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the eventual spread of WiMax will change alot of things – but only when combined with massive online storage services like Amazon S3 or XDrive.
How sweet would it be to have your mp3’s everywhere? Flip on your WiMax enabled iPod and bam – your music is there (well, this would work with things like DVR’s as well). Data should be available everywhere, and done so seamlessly.
Sprint’s outlook on WiMax is 100M users by 2008 at 4mbps at $20-$40. Hopefully they won’t make you bundle it with a phone package…
SOOO… To answer your question about “REAL competition”, I don’t think we’ll see a dent until there’s another break through. When I can hold an unlimited amount of songs on my ‘net-connected wimax-Pod, I’ll be happy.
/blog jack
never fucking happen
apple doesn’t get open
and social networks are the most open thinsg around
if jobs can’t control it, he won’t be comfortable with it
fred