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Microsoft's iPod Killer Emerges -- Should Apple be Scared? You Bet! (AAPL, MSFT)

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Legacy. Yes, MS was a succesful consumer company until 1998 and they're still living on that legacy.

Intuit is a good point. As I implied, when they actually have to compete and consumers have a real choice - they lose.

Inuit is a tiny spec of a company compared to Ms with basically a niche product but MS could not defeat them.

Ms could ONLY win during the pre-internet era because they were fierce competitors and later illegal competitors in the m,arketplace. When Ms could leverage (illegally) their monopoly in the OS market, they could defeat those companies by trading prodits from the OS to make Office 3x chaeaper tahn their competoitors and//or force manufacturers not to bundle any app they didn't want (like Netscape) but in the post internet & broadband era, it matters little (firefox or Google) - MS like an old general only knows one strategy - surround and buy up everything (outright or in exclusive licensing) but on the internet, that no longer works (ipod & itunes). The consumers choose and they seldom choose MS.

MS has never really competed against PS because they don't really see the market.

It's not 1995 anymore. The old rules do not apply anymore.

If you want a detailed reason, here ya go:

metroxing.blogspot.com...

Microsoft's iPod Killer Emerges -- Should Apple be Scared? You Bet! (AAPL, MSFT)

In case, Andrew Schmidt didn't notice, it's taken MS 9 years to come close to the Treo/Palm and that's WITH the help of partners. They want to go it alone it alone here so their firstv task will be to defeat their "partners," (Creative, iriver, san disk, sony & samsung)

How many more successes can MS or MS shareholders afford?

They've spent about $400 to sell each XBox & 360 - that's $8 BILLION dollars to be third ... which is where they will be in the ipod race ... BTW, third means a marlet share of about 5%.

MS has failed in EVERY consumer venture. MSN, MSN search, WebTv, watch OS, BobOS, The talking barney, the watch OS, home networking, the Ms remote control, and even the palm when the cosnumer amrlet was 40% of the PDA marketplace, etc ... other than buying the 15% of the video game market for $8 BILLION dollars, they pretty much are clueless when it comes to consumers.

It's not just Apple they can't compete against. It's EVERYONE who sells to consumers. MS is great at enterpros selling - completetly clueless when selling to cosnumers (just look at Vista - missed two holiday season and now coming out with 4 similiar sounding versions and offering stickers that say it's capable or Vista-ready? yea, real clear).

MS is done. They are the GM of technology.

Good at fleet selling - not much at anything else.