Things wrong with the iPod

A post about all the things Apple should do with the iPod. For the last few years they have managed to stay on top, but eventually they will fall from grace when they can no longer maintain their premium pricing. I think there are a lot of UI issues that could easily get fixed (when viewing a list of your songs, the song names don't scroll).

Apple seems to be following the same path with the iPod that they did with the Mac. For the first few years they were the cats meow, but then by sticking with premium pricing they became marginalized. It seems like Apple has made some moves toward licensing, providing Michigan and Stanford with custom iTunes stores, and the ill fated HP iPod. Once the Mac became marginalized, they lost out to Microsoft and could never catch up because of network effects. It remains to be seen if the same will happen to the iPod. It seems like the advantage the iPod has over other players is that once people use Apple's DRM they are locked in. So if someone spends a fair amount of money at iTunes, they won't want to switch to a non Apple player. Even by using the ratings system in iTunes you have become locked in as its hard to move those ratings out of iTunes.

But given that Apple is only going to slice the MP3 market into 3 or so parts, it doesn't seem that they will be able to maintain their dominance in their respective segments. Over time eventually someone will come up with a better MP3 player hardware/software setup. Assuming that player uses Microsoft's DRM then they game is over.