The Zen of Fighting iPod; Creative Technologies' Sim Wong Hoo, king of PC sound, thinks his digital music players can bite Apple.(Zen Micro)(Interview)

Byline: Steven Levy

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.

LEVY: You sold more than 2 million music players in the last quarter of 2004. Was that expected?

SIM: We were planning for more, in fact, but because the ramp-up was so fast, it became more a logistical problem than a selling problem. So in the December quarter we had no problems selling everything that we could ship out.

Why do you think your competitor, the iPod, gets so much attention?

Steve Jobs is a personality that we all have to reckon with. His way of dealing with the media and all these things is legendary. But he 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.

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