The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch:
“If you sit down next to me and say you have 1,000 songs and you pay $10 a month, how cool will I feel to say I paid $1,000 for 1,000 songs,” asked Jonathan Sasse, the president of iRiver America, a subsidiary of ReignCom, a Korean maker of portable players that has endorsed Microsoft’s format for subscription services.
How cool will you feel when I tell you I already owned all the music on my iPod and didn’t pay anything for it?
Still, dethroning the iPod won’t be easy. One reason is that none of the rival electronics companies have made a player that is nearly as attractive and easy to use. “It is not an MP3 player; it is just an iPod, and it’s only made by Apple,” said Frank Sadowski, the head of Amazon.com’s consumer electronics department. The proportion of Amazon.com customers who buy iPods continues to increase, he added.
The iPod is not an MP3 player? Well, if you insert the word “just” after “not” you would be correct. But yes, it is an MP3 player, MP3 being just one of the formats supported by the iPod.
It’s articles like this that make you wonder how well the Times covered the election or the war: the iPod is not just a standalone player. the iTunes application adds quite a bit of value, and I can understand the people at iRiver not mentioning it. But the Times reporter should know enough (perhaps he owns one or knows someone who does?) to realize the customer experience aspect of iTunes and the iPod.