There's another batch of emails from those times (can't find the link, but they will definitely appear again) where Gates is fuming that Apple has iPods, and no

There's another batch of emails from those times (can't find the link, but they will definitely appear again) where Gates is fuming that Apple has iPods, and none of their partners that have privileged access to Microsoft (like Creative) can come up with anything even closely resembling it. A few years later MS came out with Zune (so they had to do this themselves), but yeah, it was already too late.