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Lets All Build Wall Gardens
They (which includes everyone from Microsoft to Real to SanDisk) used to mock Apple for having a walled garden approach to digital music. iPod + iTunes + Apple DRM = Money. Well now they are building their own walls – Microsoft has Zune.
Folks at San Disk are now working with Real to build Sandisk Rhapsody which is tightly integrated with Sansa, reports the Wall Street Journal. My sources say that Best Buy was going to be part of this release, but there is no mention of them in the news. Of course, the Real folks never got back, and SanDisk denied that such a deal was in the works. Of course they did…. regardless, the increasing number of wall gardens must be giving Boing Boing’s Cory Doctrow some unpleasant moments.
If all these music services are going to start selling custom mp3 players, I’d at least like to see them experiment with the user interface a bit instead of cloning the ipod. For example, I’d love to see a Pandora mp3 player that uses the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons right on the front of the player. Something like this…
C’mon…let’s see some innovation!
Om, I agree, everybody is trying to imitate Apple’s success, but I do not see many focusing on the only thing that IMHO really matters, which is the consumer perspective
What are these me-toos going to offer to persuade iPod users to migrate though?
As you note, Apple has a total end to end value system ( add in the search, music metadata, analytics ), its not just the music. And the consumer device is still iConic.
I suspect (looking at the history of the Text and Webpage based ‘Nets) that the play that will undo iTunes’ dominance will be an open garden system, as that has a greater utility and unleashes the creativity of the many. It just takes longer to put together as it is a heterogenous ecosystem of multiple suppliers.