Aug 06
5
Microsoft and Apple – Clash of the Titans
It is going to be a battle for the hearts and minds. And it is going to be about music and people.
The new mp3 player from MS is going to be called Zune. Yeah – we all know that. And the rumours are that MS has reached an “accomodation” with the music industry so that people will be able to legally convert all their AAC files into the MS format without infringing. That could be big. But it is pretty much known to everyone.
It was only last week though when I was having lunch with an old buddy from MS that I put it all together. The Zune is being designed and manufactured and marketed by the team that created XBox. And these guys are almost totally separate to everyone else inside MS. They have the same corporate name – that's all.
The reality is that these guys see themselves as the true fighting spirit of MS, a SWAT team of enormous clout that was able to go from zero to 100 in almost no time flat, designing, manufacturing and marketing a product that has a totally different business model to anything that MS did before – and hugely successfully.
They now have Apple in their sights and a BHAG that will really make them into made men in Redmond. This is a battle that is about to get personal.
The Clash of the Titans is coming:
MS against Apple in the MP3 space
MS against Sony in the games platform space
Sony against Toshiba in the HD/BD format space
Apple doing an end run around Sony in the digital download space
Google against MS in pretty much every other area…
Samsung, Nokia, Sony, Motorola fighting it out in the phone space
Microsoft must wonder what has hit them – wars on multiple fronts, some of which they will undoubtedly win, and many of them that they will lose….
2007 and beyond are going to be interesting for the consumer. Prices will fall and new battlegrounds will emerge, and during that period consumers are also going to be thinking twice about their capital expenditures as cost of credit, petrol (and therefore consumables) increases…
Looks to me like the beginning of a true depression…. a period where products and prices are going to be seeking consumers while consumers increasingly sit on their hands – except where the products have relatively invisible impact – such as phones with increasingly added functionality where the purchase price is built into the plan, where there is an advertising model behind the 'free' aspect and the consumer willingly embraces this modality.
This is where Bit Torrent and open source start building critical mass.