Sunday, March 13, 2005
bloop
cameraman alert! only available on FOX HDTV Widescreen!
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(forgive this rant i'm just a geek at heart really. it's meant mostly for mingwei- yes specially for you! heh.)
and anyway mingwei, about creative, it's a little easier to write here when i don't have to stop at 200 characters. anyway i'm not creative-bashing or anything, it's a good thing that creative's successful, i've heard good things about the zen micro and all, i'm just saying that it'll never overhaul the ipod simply because it's not 'cool' enough. and they try too hard to imitate rather than innovate. creative had the market at it's feet when it started off with mp3 players, they were way ahead of apple. but apple got the concept right that's the reason why they now have more than 50% of market share in the world.
and in the case of soundcards, this is where creative has somewhat of a monopoly, and this is where they're really successful. HOWEVER, i will comment that the quality of their soundcards is not the best, chaintech's AV710 costs US$25 bucks and can beat the socks off my Audigy 2 ZS, which costs around US$130 now. cards that go for similar prices (E-mu 0404, E-mu 1212m, M-Audio 2946 among others) are way ahead of creative in terms of sound quality. the reason why they aren't so popular are because they're much lesser known and have much poorer marketing. so props to creative on the soundcard business. i'd get one of the other brands, but they're not available locally, and shipping costs way too much.
quality really doesn't decide sales though; if i were to judge from the reviews i've read, the zen touch/micro and the i-river match the ipod in every aspect, and even betters it in some others (but still definitely loses out aesthetically). example of superb marketing? bose.
bose is the ultimate cheater-of-money, the nike of the sound world. too many people are taken in by bose, by their aiwa quality speakers sold at B&O prices (not saying that B&O is not guilty of this, but B&O clearly wins out on design). not that aiwa really sucks, but bose sells speaker systems of similar quality for 5 times the price. why is it still so popular? marketing and marketing alone. however if you one day drop by a bose showroom and visit their sampling room, and take a listen, you'll be blown away by the quality. it's really pretty good. but what you don't know is that behind all this is tens of thousands (hundreds, even) of peripheral equipment that doesnt come with your purchase. you don't get the expensive gold plated cables, or the various amps or jacks, you just get your crappy speakers.
but i veer way off topic, the topic here is creative. creative isn't bad, it just isn't good enough. hopefully it'll buck up and give apple some competition. i'm not complaining, the comsumer gets all the benefits! if you're interested to read on about bose and how they cut costs and still charge exorbitant prices, this is a good site. for me, it's pretty simple really. quality is most important (check out my ugly shure earphones!). in a tie-breaker, design does matter most ;). which is why nakamichi's on my wishlist, not fantastic, but decent and really, really beautiful.
i might get sued, who knows, bose seems to like suing people for badmouthing them.
12:28 PM
