Monday, February 14, 2005

Most customers of creative Technologies don't even know it. They're the millions who have the Sound Blaster circuit boards in their PCs that process the audio boomed through the speakers. The Singapore-based company has thrown its energies into digital music players, a field it entered well before Apple's introduction of the market leader, the iPod. Nonetheless, founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo thinks his own products—the flash-based MuVo as well as the direct iPod competitor, the Zen Micro—can hold their own with Steve Jobs. We phoned the outspoken 49-year-old Sim, whose Zen playlist is heavy on Chinese and New Age music, at his Singapore headquarters.

In the December quarter we had no problems selling [all of the MP3 players] that we could ship out.

Steve Jobs ... was not the first to come out with this MP3. We started way back in 1999. We paid a lot of school fees for our mistakes along the way, but [our] company has transformed from a sound-card company into a company where we do all kinds of external products.

[The iPod shuffle] turned out totally opposite [what we expected], something like our first-generation product—no display, no radio, very simple. I believe we had this kind of thing more than three years or four years ago. You can say it's cool; I say it's plain-Jane.

From all the initial feedback we have [on Portable Media Centers], this is a media type that people want to have ... whenever I tell them they can bring all their photos with them, their perception changes. It's the same thing when we saw the first MP3 player. It may take one or two years more, but we are patient, and in the meantime we're selling a respectable number.

I'm betting on the Microsoft camp. They want to win this whole MP3 war. With all the cash they have, with all the clout they have, they are going to win—if not the first time, if not the second time, the third time, and that's why we're working very closely with them.