I believe his point was it was much more than PortalPlayer that went into the success of the iPod. Sure PortalPlayer gets kudos for what they have done and are doing, but having the smaller HDD in the beginning, a great,compact, simple design, the BEST user interface in the business, iTunes, great advertising /promotion,on and on ALL contributed to the overwhelming success of the iPod.

All companies involved benefit from being in the undisputed champion.

Looking back, who was first or close to first with a small HDD? We were with the IBM Microdrive. However, the Microdrive was very expensive at the time, we went with that silly voice -nav feature, our interface was just ok and even with the microdrive, our product was to large. We had some of the right ideas, but made poor design decisions, no money to market the product or clout to force prices of the microdrive down by shear buying power.