Sir Bill Gates (Okay, he’s not a true Sir since he’s not a British citizen) told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung some choice thoughts about the iPod. He thinks it’s a great product (pad it up for the upcoming bat swing) but feels it just won’t last. “As good as Apple may be, I don’t believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run.” Interesting comment to make when his company’s Media Player is the heart of many music players such as the Zen and Napster-players. Got to wonder what they think about Chief Bill’s comment.

To build his case, he continued to tell the German metro-paper, “You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface — like the iPod today — and then lost its position.” True, true. “If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates goes on an a failed attempt to further strengthen his foundation.

The problem with this point is the phones limited supply of storage. While we hear rumors of hard drive based phones coming, most phones are lucky to have a few megs of internal storage. Ones that do have external ports, such as Motorola’s V710, are limited to the maximum memory size of that format. TransFlash, or now mini-SD, goes up to 128MB and SD can be had at 1GB. While the later will easily take on the iPod shuffle, that’s where the comparison ends.

As Toshiba continues to push the platter density limits of their small hard drives, iPod’s will simply be able to hold more and more music. Toshiba already has an 80GB drive and the 100GB is just around the corner. The largest “quarter-sized” hard drives go up to 6GB now with no indication of breaking into double digits anytime soon. It will be those drives that will live inside cell phones and PDA’s in the future which, by Bill’s accounts, will become the digital garage for all that music. Yet as downloading services become more popular and CD’s more frequently ripped, consumers networks and PC’s will fill up with TONS of files exceeding those dinky phone drives.

Look at this from your point of view. You can get all your music on an iPod and get superior sound with the zillion accessories, both simple to complex, or use a cell phone with it’s limited storage space and poor audio? Sure, phones will advance if so needed; however, like wireless to wired connections comparisons, cell phones will never be able to catch up to the hard drive based music players. iPod or others.

Bill Gates has done great things. He robbed Big Blue of revenues by making an ingenious proposition with MS-DOS to the blinded mega-company and has successfully bought hundreds of other companies to further increase the Empire’s domination. However, he’s not as great as the press would like to paint him as all one needs to do is talk about Bob. There’s other failures, too, and other comments to the media that proved to be dead wrong. Remember in 1995 when Windows95 was released to the music of the Rolling Stones and when he was asked where the web browser was, his response was that the Internet would not be a major force in the PC industry. Oops, guess he was on his cell phone when he was asked that question and didn’t fully hear it correctly, huh?

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