I was also upset with Apple practicaly much monopolized the market with the iPod, simply because I think competition is in the best interests of the consumer.
Well, when all of the consumers want the iPod, what are you going to do? The problem was not anything Apple did; the problem was the horrible design of the competition.
I've been using portable audio players since 2004, and in that time I've had the opportunity to own a Creative Zen Vision:M which I still feel to this day was quite superior to the iPod it competed with (and cheaper too).
The device itself may have been fine - even better than the iPod in some ways - but using WMP (or whatever shareware-quality jukebox program they included in the box) is why this and similar iPod competitors crashed in the marketplace. (I had a creative nomad ii before I had an iPod, so I remember those days). People wanted a device that it was easy to put music on. ITunes (particularly in those less bloated days) was vastly superior to anything else out there - that's the main reason no one could seriously challenge it. (That, and horrible missteps like Atrac from the one company that could have challenged Apple, maybe.) The audiophile market for these devices has always been tiny; no one (statistically) cared much about flac, or ogg, or any other oddball formats. They just wanted an easy way to carry all of their music with them.
Also, I absolutely love my Zune HD. Sure its not as full featured/supported as my iPod touch, but its very noticeably lighter and I think its interface just plain owns iOS' and has helped firmly convinced me to eventually drop my Android phone in favor of a Windows Phone once my contract is up.
I think that the Zune was a really good product, and that it could have been the iPod if it had come first. But as it was, it came to market *way* too late (Xmas 2006!), still didn't have a jukebox programs as good as iTunes, and, compounding this, made some very bad initial marketing decisions (remember "Welcome to the Social?" - no one with any basis in reality would have made that useless feature the keystone of their advertising campaign).
The iPod is a great product and I love my iPod Touch, but there have been great, cheaper, and in my opinion superior products out there in the past that have been overlooked because of the power of the Apple brand.
It's not the power of the Apple brand. The power of the Apple brand was pretty diluted in 2001. It's because Apple gave people products that were absolutely superior in ways that mattered to 80% of people, even if they were inferior in ways that only mattered to 20%.
I'm sad Microsoft bowed out with the Zune HD and I'm said that the potential for great alternative players is greatly limited by the apparent lack of a market for them.
Just to offer you a detailed perspective on that so that it can make sense.
I think more and more people are using their phones as mp3 players, so there's not a lot of space at the upper end.
I do think that Apple is weak in the sub $100 market, though - while there is a lot to like about the shuffle, there is also a lot not to like about a device that holds 500 songs and doesn't have a screen.
