World's Wackiest Wealthy Wanker

You have to love Bill Gates.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Microsoft founder Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice of portable music players, and views the raging popularity of Apple's iPod player as unsustainable, he told a German newspaper.

"As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run," he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position," Gates said.

Apple has around two thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which store thousands of songs on pocket-sized disk drives or smaller flash memory chips, and sold more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter.

But it faces increasing competition not only from the likes of Sony, whose iconic Walkman dominated the personal audio market for two decades, but also from mobile-phone companies integrating MP3 players into handsets.

We'll see. I think about the only thing I see around campus these days is those damned iPods. It makes sense to have all of your personal digital immaturity all in one little package, though, so if mobile phones expand to include digital music and/or video capabilities, I have a hard time believing that every party girl in the world won't switch. That's the thing about everyone but the Japanese: they don't care what company makes it, just so long as it makes their lives more convenient.

Will Apple reach market saturation sooner, or later? Tell me what you think.