Flash, Video, and Beyond: Future of MP3 and iPod
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The mp3 player market has been dominated by devices that run on hard drives. Using the physically small hard drives originally designed for laptops, early mp3 players had a great deal of space for storing a entire music collections. Smaller and lighter mp3 players have always been on the market, but recently they have they started really replacing out hard drive based mp3 players. What do these developing trends signal in the development of portable media players?
From Hard Drives to Flash Chips
The earliest trend in mp3 players was generally focused on the idea of “Bigger is Better.” Manufacturers competed with each other to produce mp3 players with larger drive capacities. Value-added type features were relatively unimportant. A good library organization feature and the ability to play mp3 and wma files was enough to guarantee a player decent sales. Playing other codecs or having features like color screens and PDA-like functions were not considered necessary or important.
Apple changed all this by developing the iPod into a product developed and marketed based on design and add features rather than one sold based on capacity and music playing features. Apple gambled on the fact that most people aren’t interested in buying a player based on what music codecs it can play or what other features it might have solely for playing music. Rather, Apple capitalized on its brand and the design that surrounded its brand. This allowed them to leverage a majority in market share to become the dominant manufacturer in portable media devices. They developed a player interface that was minimalist at best, but gave the player a compelling visual balance and symmetry. In addition, they have added features to the iPod not necessarily restricted to simply playing music. For example, the color screen on most new iPods and the ability to sync its calendar feature with iCal are features not dedicated to playing media, but rather to developing the player as a single device solution to compete in a more broad marketplace than simply playing mp3’s on a handheld device.
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