SanDisk says the iPod won

I had 4 sandisk sansa MP3 players. 3 of one style that kept breaking and getting a new one under warranty for the one year I had them. The other broke in 6 months. Never again will I trust their operation system for MP3 players. It doesn't work at all no matter what I tried for the final player and I lost recordings I needed on it.

I personally would not own any product from lying, self-important, marketing-over-quality companies like Apple or Bose. I've been using Sansa for years and have never once had iPod envy. Money is too tight these days to be paying for high-priced marketing teams rather than engineering skill. Apple has an advantage in that it controls much of the software and hardware that attaches to their products. If they had to deal with the diversity that the PC world offers they would fall flat on their bloated, smug faces.

ITunes won the battle, not the player themselves.

Dan, from Wilmington. How wrong you are. My Mom, 83, just bought an iPod and MacBook and loving both.

I could care less about cool and I really like my Sansa player. Of course I'm almost 70 years old and how many other's my age are going to buy a MP3 player. I went for price and use SanDisk products in my cameras, all are great. My daughter has owned several iPods that stopped working, but she would not think of buying a Sansa. Even I know that Sansa not a very cool name.

Great. Now how long will it take for people to realize there is no beating the Mac? It does seem that people are finally catching on there though.

Sansa didn't lose completely. Many of the Engadget dwellers and some publications claim the Sansa Clip is a far better value than the iPod Shuffle, so I guess that's something for SanDisk to be proud of. Maybe other SanDisk players are good, too. I wouldn't ever think of giving up my iPod, but maybe others might if they tried the other SanDisk models and were basically Apple-haters.

I have to give the SanDisk CEO for just coming out and admitting that the iPod rules the industry. He can face reality unlike some other companies who believe their products rule the roost.

Specifically that dude Steve Ballmer who thinks the Zune HD is going to put a huge dent in iPod Touch sales although he knows almost nothing about why people buy Apple products and especially iPod Touches. It's difficult to win the race if you have to follow the leader to locate the finish line.

He's sure, like most other companies, figure if you spend enough money on the best hardware, that's enough to get people to buy a product. It just isn't true. That alone is not enough to do it.

Sansa also made SanDisk one of the product vendors dependent on its own Flash products, which forced the company to "eat its own dog food." This in turn undoubtedly improved the quality of its Flash product, reference implementations, documentation, and service.

It doesn't matter that the product was a flop and that you and I never saw a Sansa in the wild.

Smart move!

Trout and Ries said it 30 years ago in their classic book, Positioning, the battle for your mind, which was basically, whoever gets to market first, wins. Case in point.

That said, you can blow it. WordPerfect vs Word, Netscape vs IE; but it's hard to unseat a good product, even if yours is better. Fact is no reason to believe. Apple is so much about the culture of cool that no one can out cool them, whether you like them or not. My kids wanted an iPod not a Zune (they probably never even heard of the Sansa).