Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 19th, '05

[theknife]

good stuff, as always, Jack

Yet another Chinese Electronics Firm has come out with yet another solid state MP3 player. They’re calling theirs the “Super Shuffle”. Available in half and full gig sizes the USB player/recorder/receiver will ship soon according to the maker LuxPro. Problem is the new unit, which boasts features like FM radio, voice and broadcast recording, bears more than a little resemblance to an Apple iPod Shuffle, itself a riff on previous flash players. This clone of a clone has led some of the more cantankerous of the Apple faithful to sniff and snarl at the sheer crassness of it all. The Applesquad are fairly predicting Steve Jobs will sue the Asians out of existence and deservedly so as far as they’re concerned. Perhaps he’ll try, and if Apple had actually invented USB thumb-drive players, brought them up from birth to this great new market they might at least have a moral point, but like the mouse and GUIs, Apple did not create them. In fact, they were late to the flash player game. However even Sony, which actually did invent the personal player and with it ushered in an entirely new industry, dealt with the scores of copycats and competitors by aggressively staying ahead of them technically and aesthetically, producing some 1200 individual models and in so doing grabbed decades of record profits for their efforts. So much so they were able buy a movie studio and the world’s largest record company outright. It’s no coincidence then that when Sony allowed those Columbia guys to hobble their engineers things went badly for them fast. They have still not recovered. Just last week the once proud Japanese giant went outside the company – and the country – for the first time in their corporate history and placed a foreigner at the top. It remains to be seen what if anything he can do to save the tottering titan.

i'm really looking forward to seeing the market for mp3 players open up. i never understood the hype about iPods...cachet aside, they just seem like highly overpriced hard drives to me. as jump drives and hard drives get cheaper and cheaper, it seems reasonable to expect someone to come along with a 1 gig mp3 player/flash drive for well under $100 (particularly since i can already get a 1 gig jump drive for about $60).