Digital Home Thoughts: PlaysForSure Approach Misguided? Ross Rubin Thinks So

"In the physical world, consumers choose stores based on price and convenience. The price competition among digital music stores is minimal as there isn’t much headroom for price-slashing and no online store has a significant convenience advantage. On the device side, consumers care about price and features. Again, no Apple competitor has undercut the iPod by a significant enough margin. While many players offer features that Apple does not, they haven’t been appealing enough to overcome Apple’s integrated approach."

This article doesn't go very deep (the perils of having to crank out content every week I suppose), but it does scratch the surface of a significant problem that: there is no clear and decisive broad market advantage that the PlaysForSure camp has over the iPod camp. There are some small advantages that make all the difference to some people - 95% of my music is in WMA format, so iPods are iNothings for me - but to Joe Average who has 50 CDs in his collection and is looking to get an audio player, the real battleground is around the cool factor, what his friends are using, music selection, and price. PlaysForSure is a good step forward, but I think it won't start to gain traction until early 2006, when a new series of players have been released, and every older player possible has been upgraded.