Whuh-oh, there's trouble a-brewin' in the Far East, folks-- trouble spelled W-A-R. But before you get all worked up about it, there are two good reasons not to panic. The first is that it's not the kind of war where a bunch of people get shot at with inevitably icky consequences; it's a war between makers of digital music players, which we expect leads to considerably less loss of life. And the second is that it's Creative, makers of those Zen and Nomad doohickeys, declaring war against Apple. No, honestly! Faithful viewer Ken Drake forwarded us an article in The Register which quotes Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo as saying "the MP3 war has started and I am the one who has declared war."

"So what?" you might well ask, give that the last sales numbers we'd seen were from September and showed that the iPod line had a 90.9 percent share compared to Creative's 2.6 percent. With numbers like that, we're basically looking at the other side of the Windows-vs.-Mac relative proportions, and as we all know, if Apple were to declare war on Windows tomorrow, everyone would just stifle a chortle and try to avoid eye contact. So what could Apple possibly have to fear from Sim Wong Hoo's chest-thumping warmongering?

Well, we'll tell you. See, there's just one problem with that 90.9 percent figure: it represents the iPod's share of hard drive-based players sold, and if you mix in all those dinky flash-based players as well, then Apple has "only" 65.8 percent of the market. And if you think it still sounds like Creative's taking on a lost cause, well, we lied; there are actually two problems, the second of which being that all those figures are for U.S. sales only. See, contrary to popular belief (at least the popular belief of Americans, and let's face it-- who else matters?), there are actually other countries out there somewhere. We know... spooky, right? What's more, people in those other countries apparently buy portable digital music players, and most of those players aren't made by Apple.

The bottom line is that when you look at Apple's global market share for digital music players, it's reportedly a mere 17 percent-- compared to Creative's 10 percent. So yeah, Apple's ahead, but not by anywhere near the amount that the U.S. numbers imply, and Creative's goal of overtaking Apple isn't quite as absurd as you might have thought. Creative has promised to "spend some serious money" ($100 million, it seems) in order to "out-market everyone," Apple included. Spent wisely, that kind of cash really could steal four market share points from Apple pretty quickly to win Creative the lead-- maybe not by the end of the year, like the psychotically optimistic Sim Wong Hoo thinks, but in six months? Twelve? It's entirely possible.

Then again, it's not like Apple's just standing still on the battlefield. The good news here is that the main reason why the Creative-vs.-Apple numbers are so much closer worldwide than in the U.S. is because, as faithful viewer Josh Lockie informs us, in Asia, flash-based players reign supreme, and by a huge margin. So if the rumored flash-based iPods do indeed surface early next year and they're half as slick as their big brothers are (and really, why wouldn't they be? It's DNA, after all), Creative really may have bitten off more than it can chew-- or even more than it can stuff into its piehole with the aid of a shoehorn, a plunger, and four extra hands. Stay tuned, and we'll all see if this really does turn out to be a war, or just Creative getting its kiester handed to it on a paper plate.