It’s officially official: the iPod is the number one media player in the known universe. The number two media player is the entire Sansa line from flash maker SanDisk. Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk, admits that he’s content to sit at the number two spot. And why shouldn’t he?

As king of the hill, Apple has nowhere to go but down. They need to continue to improve on their core offering, which will make them necessarily averse to taking too many risks with new product features or functionality. SanDisk, on the other hand, can afford to be a little more freewheeling — if not outright unconventional — with their features and functions, because they have room to move up the totem pole.

The Sansa line isn’t even SanDisk’s core product: that would be their flash memory business, from which they earn substantial revenues from patent licensing. So SanDisk has even more latitude to get funky in the portable music player market. Sometimes being #2 ain’t so bad.

Via CNN Money.