Here is Wendy's response:
Subject: Re: Product development
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 1999 10:31:31 -0700
From: Wendy Ravenel <wendy@edig.com>
To: (JimC1997)
CC: Robert@edig.com
Thank you for writing. Your suggestion is very interesting. I am happy to pass it along to the engineering department.
Here are some things I thought of while looking over your message: I agree that some customers for Internet music players will want to download and store many hours' worth of music, and while the price of flash memory continues to decrease, it could become cost-prohibitive to store a large collection on CompactFlash(TM).
There is quite a bit of established competition to consider if e.Digital were to think about developing special memory options just for music as an accessory to the Internet music player. Given that other types of memory (hard drive space in particular) have notoriously tight profit margins, and given that there are so many manufacturers and options available to consumers, it seems like an uphill battle for anyone entering the memory market, even with such a niche product. True, the big Internet music afficionados will need huge amounts of memory for storaging large music collections, say, tens of gigabites, but they already have removable options such as data cassette cartridges, recordable CD's, or ZIP disks, and internal or external hard drives, optical drives, or even so-called jukebox towers. (I can't think of a more appropriate application for those than storing and retrieving music collections!)
Having a special memory device that looks less like a PC peripheral and more like a stereo rack component would certainly support the current trend toward home computers acting as entertainment centers, but I wonder whether the investment in its development would really pay off.
I thank you for your suggestion.
Best regards,
Wendy Ravenel
|
