Fast Company asserts that the iPod is doomed due to Apple’s failure to support an economic ecosystem around it. While it’s debatable that this mentality did originally result in the market defeat of the Mac OS by Windows, I think Belkin, Griffin, Bose, Harmon-Kardon, and the dozens of other companies making iPod products would all cry “Horsefeathers!” And the author’s initial assertion that the iPod shuffle has met with “limited success” is just ignorant and wrong, according to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, who believes that Apple may be moving one million iPod shuffles a month.
I like Fast Company, but someone needs to do a little more research.
Oh, and my theory for how to make the next iPod just as revolutionary? Video iPod with an easy setup to rip existing DVDs into a copy-protected iPod-friendly format. I’d like to watch videos on my pocket device too, but I’m not about to go repurchase my entire media collection in some proprietary format (*cough* *cough* SonyUMD *cough*). And the rumors of an iTunes video store? Awesome. Not sure how to satisfy the instant-gratification element there, exactly (download times at today’s bandwidth restrictions still suggest that a high-def file would take hours to download; the high-res V for Vendetta trailer alone was 137MB and took over ten minutes), but it’s still awesome.