Sandisk - the #2 player in the space - partners up with Yahoo! to take on Apple. My only question, frankly, is where on earth is Sony (Walkman anyone?).
If Any Given Sunday taught us anything, it’s that the yards become harder to win as you get closer and closer to the end zone… and at 73% market share, I must say that Apple has a lot of share to lose, and Yahoo! and Sandisk make a formidable #2…
Here are a few of the features not shared by either iPod or Zune:
This is all nice and dandy, but is it just me of did Yahoo!/SNDK stop short? How so? Sandisk is all about flash memory, Yahoo! all about entertainment… but why not bring a telco into the mix and make this into a phone/browser? Recall that a week or two ago, Yahoo! made a big splash in wireless, the one area where some say Yahoo! is ahead of Google in search.
If I am Sandisk - #2 at 9% in digital music players - or Yahoo! - #2 in search with 30% market share - I’d look for an iPod killer/Google killer respectively, and seeing how the iPhone will rightfully or wrongfully get much buzz upon launch this year, I’d make sure I’d have plans to turn this into a phone/PDA/web browser pretty soon. Who knows, maybe that’s already in the works.
Disclosure: I’ve owned shares of Sandisk in the past. Also own Yahoo! as we speak.
April 9th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
[…] Yahoo/Sansa’s Music Player Foray: 100M iPods too Late? If I am Sandisk - #2 at 9% in digital music players - or Yahoo! - #2 in search with 30% market share - I’d look for an iPod killer/Google killer respectively, and seeing how the iPhone will rightfully or wrongfully get much buzz upon launch this year, I’d make sure I’d have plans to turn this into a phone/PDA/web browser pretty soon. Who knows, maybe that’s already in the works. […]