Rio on the attack, targeting iPod dominance

Hugh Cooney, president of Rio, covets the top spot among digital music players earned by the iPod. His plan: "design the right product at the right value and then use any kind of buzz we can take advantage of."

The iPod currently accounts for 54.7 percent of the digital music player market, to Rio's 8.9 percent. But marketing VP
Dan Torres believes the Rio is already sneaking market share from Apple: "When we look at the entire space, Apple makes only a hard-disk player. We have a new hard-disk offering in the Carbon 5 gigabyte. It's a little hard for us to figure out what share we're taking from them, but we're competing with them directly. So far we think we're doing quite well,
and we'll be taking share away from iPod mini." Hmmm... perhaps that faith-based initiative will eventually be backed with some numbers. :)

Torres thinks the MP3 player market is changing: "I think we see people starting to differentiate on a variety of characteristics, whether it's about branding, youthful market, or price." Not to bring in any of these fuzzy ideals or anything, but what about those boring old metrics like functionality, design, ease of use? Nahhhh. Why talk tech specs when it's all just branding and price?! :)