Engineers like to think that success is all about the best idea or the best code. The reality is that success is all about execution. The code and the idea are part of execution but so is marketing and branding and finance and a lot of other, non-engineering, things.
This is a good article illustrating that Creative had the idea but Apple had the execution and the rest is history.
A Patent Fight Over iPod Shows Merits of Buzz
June 8, 2006
Creative Technology LTD, a Singapore firm founded by a quirky genius who writes Chinese action-adventure novels in his spare time, invented a hard-drive MP3 player in 2000, two years before the iPod arrived on the scene.
Although it was first with the hard-drive MP3 technology, Creative invested little in brand marketing and spurned Apple's advances to work together. When the iPod arrived in stores in late 2001, Apple easily stole the show.
It didn't have to be that way. Creative states in its suit that Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs approached the Singapore company in early 2001 to propose that his company either license Creative's technology or that Creative spin off its portable-digital-media-player business into a separate company in which Apple would invest. Creative claims it turned down those proposals. Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., and Creative both declined to comment.
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In the first four months of 2006, Apple had a 77% share of the U.S. portable-MP3-player market in terms of unit sales. The remaining top four competitors, including Creative, have less than 10% each, according to market-research group NPD, of Port Washington, N.Y.
Creative wasn't the only MP3 maker that dropped the ball. Competitors like iRiver, a unit of Reigncom Co., of South Korea, and even Sony Corp. did equally poor jobs of marketing their music players to mass consumers, says Ted Schadler, a consumer-electronics analyst at Forrester Research. "With Creative, Rio and the others, you just didn't have that same marketing savvy. It was kind of like amateur hour," Mr. Schadler says.
