History of technology - Essay Example

A small hand held device with more than thousand songs and videos that can be carried around anywhere in the pocket. An amazing piece of technology devised for all music lovers transcending age barriers. The portable media player has met with huge success in the market in the last 5 years since its launch in 2001. The product has sparked massive interest in the age group of 15-35 initiating a revolution in the music industry. The small palm sized device can store more than thousand songs, videos, and photographs along with movies and television shows that can be downloaded to watch in leisure.

Besides these the device is also used to play games, store audio versions of books and free podcasts. The device has in built security options with 20hrs of battery life and 80GB of storage capacity (Levitas and Prete 3). The main brands of these technologies are Apple's I-Pod and Microsoft Zune. Apple comments this innovation as: "It's hard to say exactly which moment it was that we realized the iPod had taken over our entire civilization. But it might have been this one: The day we first heard, last summer, that baseball players were using their iPods to do their pregame video studies - as opposed to, say, their pregame Shakira video studies.

What we have here, friends, is one of history's most amazing gizmos ever." [Jan 31, 2007] - Jayson Stark writes for ESPN The first company which sold portable multimedia players was Archos. The product appeared on the market in 2002 year, and since that time was improved by Apple and Microsoft. The data of portable multimedia players are stored at hard-drives, on flesh memory or microdirves. Consumers of almost all ages have shown preference to the portable multimedia players. The new era sees the consumers switching from the conventional CDs to digital music.

The product awareness campaigns have registered in the consumer minds when they make the purchase decision. Consumers are not at all hesitant in paying the price for the ipod since they trust the brand. But not all consumers feel the same way - a segment of consumers will also refrain from making the purchase of the portable multimedia players. The reason being they do not want to pay so much to own the portable multimedia player (Field 65).The uniqueness of this device is that it can play digital video and audio files.

Many devices have FM tuners or a line out cable. The ipod allows the users to store and watch movies - but the size of the screen does not appeal the consumers much. These are some of the concerns raised by the consumers across. What we need to understand is that when the consumer is willing to pay such a high price for the portable multimedia player their expectations from the product and the company naturally is high too. They expect their portable multimedia player to be the best and long lasting with all the advanced features and more (McCrea 57).

Moreover, the consumer is easily bored and is continually looking for more features. A portable multimedia player has so far been highly successful in registering their image in the minds of the masses. But what we need to assess further is our strategy to uphold this image for a long time in future. We need to focus on the following areas to strengthen our market segment: Portable multimedia