Microsoft to undercut iPod price, offer more choices

Based on basically everything that MS has ever done, I'll believe that the "look and feel" will be as good when I see it.

And what do they mean about a $50 digital music player? I assume they don't mean they are going to sell a hard drive based player with the same kind of capacity for that much........ if it just means they'll flood the market with el cheapo $50 flash players... so what?

if they're going to deliver a product similar to the cheapest iPod(mini), then they'll probably subsidize a good portion of the production cost. this of course is being done just to push wma, imho.

They have a lot of cash reserves, and can afford to "buy" market share. They STILL lose money on every single XBOX sold, and will probably never make any profit on them.

Knowing them, it will in fact have a hard drive and will probably run some hybrid version of WinCE or PocketPC - with all the DMCA goodies like Media player 9.

I'll buy one, and wait for the thing to be reverse engineered and loaded with a decent OS.

The first versions of Internet Explorer were, on the surface, as good as Netscape. Of course MS was willing to spend from its war chest to undercut Netscape and capture the browser market. For this they were found guilty of wielding monopoly power. Looks like they learned their lesson, eh?

You have no idea how right you are...

Check out the BIO of the MS guy who made the comment:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/yusuf/default.asp

"Mehdi introduced and led the marketing for Microsoft® Internet Explorer versions 1.0 through 5.0."

The cheapo ones will just be flash drives, probably 128 or 256 MB at most (my guess is 128, with them saying "See, with WMA, you can still put a thousand songs in your pocket with these things" or something like that.

The problem with the statements from MS are they don't understand the iPod. There's not an iPod filling all voids. Apple has intentionally blown off the low-end flash market. Their target is the $200+ market. So more choices from MS than the iPod doesn't mean much to me. Now, are there going to be more choices in the 2GB+ space realm?

It's not like the masses have ever cared about cheap Apple knock-offs before. We can talk all day about how Microsoft's player is not as pretty, elegant, functional, etc, but if it costs less and there is a massive advertising push, it has a good chance of hurting iPod's success.

I can see Microsoft doing this-buying market share. In their convicted state, they should not be allowed to. However, the DOJ is unlikely to do anything about it. The newest judge seems to be a Microsoft employee.

"Microsoft-branded devices will 'look and feel' as good as the iPod for as little as $50"

and google will give free mail with 1 gb (now they say 1000gb)

we r all surrounded by liars

Judging by Microsoft's past record, they might look pretty good - but it'll take you three hours just to work out how to switch the damn thing on!