Thought at Walkman's 30th birthday: why did iPod dominate the media market nowadays?

Thought at Walkman's 30th birthday: why did iPod dominate the media market nowadays?

Sony Walkman has turned 30 years old today. Thirty years ago, the device was revolutionary changed the way people listened to music. Sony sold 30,000 Walkmans in the first two months after its launch, and 50 million within a decade. It created the portable media player market. Three decades on, however, Sony is struggling against rivals such as Apple, which has enjoyed immense success with its iPod music player. Apple iPod might be the market leader today. While people celebrate Walkman’s 30th birthday, I wonder what makes iPod became dominance in the media player market instead of the original Sony Walkman?

Sony Company has always been developing its video and audio products. Sony Walkman’s latest flagship model, the NW-X1060, packs noise canceling, a bright touch screen display, mobile TV, and the ability to surf the Internet With the storage of 32GB, it can hold 8,000 songs (128kbps mp3) or 120h video playback (at 384kbps). It support all major file types includes MP3, MP4, WMA, AAC, Linear PCM, AVC, WMV, JPEG.
The Sony PSP Go will come in fall of this year. It is a much smaller, sexier device that drops the UMD, adds 16GB of flash RAM and Bluetooth, and compresses the older PSP’s brick-like form factor to a narrower, sleeker size and shape. It’s got a huge amount of storage space for you to store music, videos and games. The files support MPEG-4, AVI video format and MP3 audio format.
Besides the multimedia player, Sony’s phone also has powerful multimedia function. The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 is convergence of multimedia entertainment and mobile web communication. It has a 3.0 inches TFT touchscreen with shades of 65K internal screen colours and gives a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. This let the users to play games and watch video clips on its wide screen easily. The video resolution support 640x480 pixels and video format support MPEG-4. The music format support: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eACC+, WMA (including protected WMA).
By the way, a lot of people don’t know where to get videos and songs when they take a Sony multimedia device. Some may purchase music and movies online. If you still don’t know where to get or don’t want to buy online, you may use Nidesoft DVD to Sony Xperia Converter to convert DVD files into your Sony device, or use Nidesoft Sony Xperia Converter to convert all other video files into Sony device. It can be used for all Sony products.

After look into Sony product, let’s turn our attention to iPod. Apple first released the original iPod in late 2001, and it was quickly destined to be a huge success. It was exactly what people wanted. It has simple interface, large capacity, fashionable, and visually attractive.
http://images.apple.com/uk/itunes/wh...ds20080909.jpg
Simple Interface - The Apple iPod has an extremely simple interface, needing only a few seconds of use to be able to master it. It is very easy to use.

Large capacity - The current regular iPod has 8GB or 16GB capacity. It can holds large amount of songs and movies, enable you to enjoy them.

It's visually attractive – The appearance of iPod was fashionable. They made it look very sexy, appealing to just about everyone, and is now extremely recognizable.

Windows and Mac compatibility - When they crossed over to the windows market, they more than tripled their market, literally reaching anyone that owned a computer.

These are the things that really make the Apple iPod dominate the mobile MP3 player market, reaching over 70% of the market share. Apple never simply wanted to dominate the market with one product though, they're still releasing new products at an alarming rate, each of which are doing extremely well. From iPod Mini to iPod Shuffle, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, from first generation to second generation, third generation. The Apple iPod will never stop giving us surprise by improving its iPod products, and I think that is the most important reason why iPod lead the media player market.

its quite simple: The iPod really is the superior product right now. Despite its limitations (Only being compatible with Apple Branded products and products licensed from Apple, as well as playback issues with the majority of video codecs), they just have the most bang for your buck right now, even though its a very large buck.

I personally have a 32gig 2nd Generation iPod touch, and I love it, even more so then the 80gig iPod classic I had previously. Cost me 450 dollars, but I never leave home with out it. I keep all my phone numbers on it, My work schedule is on it, I surf the web on it when I'm away from my computer, or at an open wi-fi spot. I'm also very happy that I was finally able to Jail Break it so I can do more with it then what apple intended.

I've used other mp3 players in the past, and I've found them lacking. I find the Zune's interface clunky and slow, while the Touch's is intuitive and smooth.

Here's a screenshot of my ipod home screen
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...7/IMG_0082.png

Moving to Tech Center

Grumble Grumble Grumble

The iPod wasn't necessarily a superior product that Sony couldn't one-up with a better product. The issue that handicapped Sony at the time was the political and commercial acceptance of the MP3 digital file format.

In addition to being a manufacture of consumer electronic products, Sony is also a publisher of record label albums, selling CDs, tapes, and records. The MP3 format was viewed as a venue illegal bootleg exchange of music media. And by accepting the MP3 format for use in consumer electronic products, Sony would be declaring an acceptance of music piracy, leading to the loss of their music publishing division...

Apple Computers, not having a pre-existing music publishing division, had no qualms about the source of those MP3 files, was among the first companies to support the format in a portable player. But what really led to the success of the iPod was that Apple was the first major corporation to sell digital files over the Internet, and implement a proprietary DRM file protection to discourage piracy and attract commercial music publishers...

It is 100 percent better then walkman was. Walkman with their lame magnetic tape systems could only store som much data. The wave of the future is digital music. They did not see that coming and got crushed. Now sony does make excellent products that play great digital music now and many prefer those to their ipods. But their years of reliance on magnetic tape sealed their fate.