Do you still use your iPod? Unless you’re either very nostalgic or pretty cool*, you probably haven’t thought about Apple’s old line of MP3 players in a decade. 19 years ago, Bill Gates, the founder of computer giant Microsoft accurately predicted its downfall but failed to capitalize on it.
In an interview with the German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung back in 2005, Bill Gates talked about the ongoing success of Apple’s MP3 player, which had launched four years prior in 2001. As spotted by NBC News back in 2005, Bill Gates said: “As good as Apple may be, I don’t believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run”. Continuing on, he told the German newspaper “You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphic user interface — like the iPod today — and then lost its position.”
