when you’ve got nothing nice to say…

marketing and pr is a tricky business if you don’t know how to play. coca-cola and nike pretty much invented the rules. sony is so good that—to this day—they’re still convincing the uninformed to buy their mediocre products. and at the top of the heap sits apple, thanks in no small part to the ipod. though apple has had missteps in the past (and the present), their spin machine right now is so phenomenal that they’ve been able to persuade hundreds of thousands of people that random play is a “feature”.

which is why for apple’s competitors, no matter how cool you try to play it, you’re always going to be struggling to catch up. for example, when the ipod shuffle was first released, creative’s ceo had this to say:

“So I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people—it’s worse than the cheapest Chinese player,” he added. “Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don’t have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it’s a non-starter to begin with.”

strangely enough, they thought it was so cheap and crappy that they decided to develop a new mp3 player recently:

Releases Apr 04/05. The MuVo Mix 512MB is an incredibly easy-to-use MP3 player. It directly plugs into your USB port so no software or cables are needed! It also features Shuffle playback so you can enjoy your favourite songs in random order everyday.

hmm… no FM, no display, and “shuffle” playback. sounds vaguely familiar.