New Competition for Apple's iPod

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured an article describing the latest attempt to dethrone Apple's iPod franchise.

The device in question, the "Sansa Connect," is an MP3 player from Zing, a startup founded by an ex-Apple senior developer, combined with SanDisk and Yahoo.

According to the article, the leading 'wow' feature of the Sansa Connect is its wireless connectivity. Apparently, though, the main method of using the Sansa Connect is to rent music from Yahoo for $11.99/month. Music is downloaded in pre-packaged mixes from Yahoo, rather than on a song-by-song basis, as with iTunes.

According to Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo Music,

"We want to be the music dial tone for connected devices."

OK. Sounds puzzling to me, but perhaps I'm not a member of their target market.

What strikes me about the Sansa Connect, however, is how it seems to demonstrate an innovation-related idea I first conceived back in 1984 or thereabouts, when I was with AT&T. At the time, it occurred to me that one of the very major advantages of a first-moving innovator was that s/he faces an unploughed field of opportunity. Given some sort of technological or feature/function innovation, the first entrant can pretty much move in any direction.

However, second and later entrants are restricted by existing market positions and strengths of earlier innovators in the product market. The image I had was of a farmer allowed to plough new furrows in the field of opportunity, but none of which could cut across existing furrows of other farmers/earlier entrants.

As such, Sansa Connect seems to be grasping at a few technological frills, such as wireless downloads, while omitting the powerful, simple and useful features of iTunes. It can't apparently offer owned music, nor individually-selected artists, songs, etc. But you can download wirelessly. Yessir.

It's a curious approach to taking on the juggernaut that is now Apple's iPod franchise. Somehow, for me, it befits Yahoo's perennial 'day late and a dollar short' style in most of what it does. I suppose Zing will sell some hardware, as will SanDisk. But, once again, I expect Yahoo to come up short in yet another product/market. Not to mention that it seems to stretch the company pretty thin, to be competing with Google on one hand, and Apple on the other. Even savvy, deep, talented managements would, I think, have their hands full pulling this off. How Yahoo expects to do so is beyond my understanding.