Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking iPods on Yahoo! News

"Microsoft founder Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice of portable music player, and views the raging popularity of Apple's iPod player as unsustainable, he told a German newspaper.

'As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,' he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

'You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position,' Gates said.

Apple has around two thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which store thousands of songs on pocket-sized disk drives or smaller flash memory chips, and sold more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter.

But it faces increasing competition not only from the likes of Sony, whose iconic Walkman dominated the personal audio market for two decades, but also from mobile-phone companies integrating MP3 players into handsets.

Partly in response to pressure from Apple, Microsoft is now positioning itself to be a key player in the growing market for digital movies, pictures and music and grow beyond its core Windows operating system business.

It is working with partners such as Samsung to provide its Windows Mobile smartphone software to 40 handset makers." (full article @ link)
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