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Opening Zune Sales Flaccid
An anonymous reader writes "As 'Black Friday' approaches and consumers line up for the Playstation 3 it looks like Zune has become an afterthought. Despite months of hype, opening Zune sales are only so-so. While Zune did reach the top 10 on Amazon's Top 25 list for electronic product sales on its first day, it quickly fell below the top 15 and continues to drop. Six separate iPod models now outsell it as well as SanDisk's e250 player. In-store sales are not much better."
I think (just my opinion) with all of the up-front hype and the resulting "flaccid" initial sales figures, Microsoft may have offered up a pretty big loser. Why? Because so much about the Zune and (some of) its features depend on the social network aspect to achieve functionality, and that won't happen with this slow of a ramp.
The flip side, also not good, is that with the slow uptake, the disappointing lack of ability to really use the wireless (because of a dearth of "others") will generate a viral, grassroots word of mouth ripple discourageing potential "others" to buy.
Now slap on the silly DRM, the incompatiblity with almost everything else, the silly purchase plan (float MS a loan anyone?), this product is going nowhere fast. In some ways, too bad, it actually looked to have a certain coolness, but Microsoft forgot and left too heavy a signature...
Maybe the good news out of all of this is the added prompting for makers like Apple to be more aggressive rolling out things like wireless, etc., though it looks to me like Apple has titrated their rollout almost perfectly.
when you think you can enter into a saturated market just because you have huge mounds of cash. What's next, a chain of Microsoft restaurants? I have an idea, why doesn't Microsoft start selling shoes?
Microsoft has gotten so large that it has no direction. They'll just piss money into the wind trying to crowbar into other markets as the fancy strikes them.
Its Zune, on Amazon's top 100 products :)
Fantastic work their Microsoft, beaten by even iPod cases and cheap ass dvd players
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Frankly, I'm amazed that the thing got into the Amazon top ten list at all. I wonder how many units you have to sell in a day to get on that list, and just how many of those units were Evil Empire minions buying one for the team?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't believe this first generation Zune, adapted as it was from an existing player, is meant to be anything more than a placeholder, a foot in the door. The really interesting battle, IMHO, will be the second generation Zune against whatever iPod exists when it comes out.
Low sales, if anything, give Microsoft a chance to work out Zune Marketplace bugs, while treating the paying public like beta testers, which is their style. Higher sales would just mean the possibility of more angry customers during this trial run.
Balmer's idea is find something to do a Lock-IN.
Consumers DO NOT WANT TO BE LOCKED IN.
All else is BS.
This is normal for Microsoft. The first release of a new product never does well. Windows 1 was terrible. Early versions of Excel weren't competitive with Lotus 1-2-3. The original Internet Explorer was lame. It took three years before ".NET" made any sense. Direct-X was terrible in its early versions. The original Xbox worked but was a huge money drain on Microsoft.
Then Microsoft fixes the problem. Each new release gets better. In time, the competition is crushed.
People have already wizened up to MP3 players. The popular ones don't have proprietary file formats, have a USB mass storage connection and a FM radio. Zune fails on all counts.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I spot a pattern with Microsoft releasing hardware. They do it late, they make big and clonky hardware, and they tie it to their operating system.
Exhibit 1: PocketPC. It flopped twice before taking off, and by then, it was too late, because the PDA was already a sinking star and most people needing the functionality bought smartphones instead. There was no way that a HUGE and clumsy PocketPC device of ~year2000 was going to compete with the dapper Palm V/Vx, and it didn't. Too big, too mediocre, too late.
Exhibit 2: Microsoft Phone. Anyone remember those? Wireless landline phones which hooked into your PC and gave you an on-screen warning about who was calling and a summary of all calls. Well, the thing was HUGE, could only be used with certain PCs, and flaws like someone rebooting a PC tossing people off-line. And by the time it came out, most phones already had all that functionality built in to the phone. The MS phone didn't have a display, the competition did. Too big, too mediocre, too late.
Exhibit 3: Zune. Compare this to the iPod Nano or Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. It's too big, too mediocre, too late.
There's other examples of failed MS hardware too, like tablet PCs (which were re-launched no less than THREE times before finally finding a niche). The only MS hardware I can think of that has achieved some success are the keyboards and joysticks (although I would think Logitech holds a much bigger market share).
Regards,
--
*Art
Sure, we all understand nobody likes the king of the hill, no matter if it is deserved or not.
But I hope this helps put to rest the continued notion that iPods only sell so well only because they are a marketing gimmick or some status symbol only to be worn to look 'cool'.
The iPod is, for years now, been a well designed and well executed product. The scroll wheel introduced with the first iPod minis soon appeared on the complete iPod line when everyone including Apple realized it is what seperates it from all the other mp3 player interfaces. Well, it did until Zune and many others tried to imitate it.
The iTunes interface won over many converts from Winamp and Musicmatch Jukebox before they even owned an iPod. Simplicity and power won over again. The iTMS isn't the best selling store by accident.
Sure, the iPod is hyped, but perhaps it is for a good reason. People aren't dropped hundreds of dollars because they're stupid. At least for not this long and for this many years and different iPod models. Has there been a single iPod model that flopped?
That may be, and I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count. If this is their strategy, then bad move Microsoft.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The really frustrating thing about the Zune is that it is essentially a terrific product. The problem is Microsoft's insistence at putting the interests of vendors first and the interests of their customers a distant second. If they'd only let the damn hardware do all it could do, the thing would be selling like hotcakes. The Zune's wi-fi capability COULD let you share whole playlists, and COULD let you be a DJ and stream to several Zunes simultaneously, and COULD let you share music without wrapping it in arbitrary DRM and COULD let you sync it with a PC without a cable. It could also let you use it as a hard drive and let you sync it with a Mac or a Linux box. But no. Instead, Microsoft's DRM tightassness won't let the Zune be all it could be and what we have now will go down in history as the Bob of music players.
But the handful of other posters are dead-on accurate as to why the Zune is going to fail.
There is already word of mouth that the Zune is encumbered with myriad of limitations. The whole product launch follows a very traditional marketing strategy complete with a flash yet typical advertising campaign. In the days of yore, a company could manufacture hype for a product. Before the internet, word of mouth spready very, very slowly. Now, if you fuck it up -- you're done. Really done.
Who was Microsoft marketing the Zune to exactly? One could only hope that they would have actually done some market research on their target demographic. Enough to know that these people aren't as gullible as they once thought. Clearly, this isn't the case.
The product itself follows the mantra of design-by-deception. Forget all of the stuff about DRM and fair-use. Although that did play a part, the true problem with the Zune is that it was a product manufactured by people who really didn't want it to succeed. The modus operandi of corporations is to build a system to maintain the status quo. We're in a period of time where innovation threatens the life blood of the huge conglomorate. Sure, this threat has always existed -- but not to such a degree as it does today. The unwritten motivation for every decision is to make sure that everything is built to keep things from progressing beyond a company's capacity to adapt. Adaptation brings risk, and nobody in a position of executive privilege truly wants to accept responsibility for a failure, or responsibility for controlling risk. It's PMI training gone haywire.
So, how does this manifest? The Zune is a perfect example. They see the threat coming, they don't want to assume any risk, they design a product to fail and thus hurt the industry where the so-called rising star is coming from, and maintain the status quo.
It's truly brilliant, but this strategy is never laid on paper. It's never communicated. It's simply the ebb and flow of business, which is itself a manifestation of the human being's drive towards power and influence, which is completely derived from human desire for their memory to outlive their physical being due to doubts about the true meaning of life and death.
In an ironic twist, many don't realize that by being a part of the problem, by sacrificing forward progress, they are in fact going against the very nature of man's ambitions. This is, of course, manic. It's probably why we built the bomb, build biological weapons, etc. It's the vain hope that someday somebody actually will make a mistake and wipe us all out, so that some creature down the road might learn from our mistakes and by doing so, we may have a final, romantic sense of redepmtion for our own.
At frist glance it might seem like a lock in, but look at it carefully. You can listen to an ITMS song on your computer, up to 4 other computers, burn it to a CD, or listen to it on your iPod. The biggest thing to remember is that once you've burned it to a CD, it's pretty much open season what you can do with it then.
my pet machine
If it wasnt for slashdot, i wouldnt even know what a zune is.
Where's Palm? Exactly where they were, technically, and still with a large chunk of the market. And Windows, meanwhile, has a much more modern product and is still trailing Palm (in the few studies honest enough to include the Treo, that is)... despite years of Palm neglecting to deliver a modern OS. It really tells you how eager people are to have a Microsoft-based device in their pocket, doesn't it?
That's simply not true. Apple has the worst lock in sceme in the entire consumer electronics industry, yet people line up outside their stores like they're in the former Soviet Union waiting for toilet paper. Slashdot geeks all hyped up on Jolt and Slashdot groupthink don't want lock in. Consumers at large couldn't care less.
This is the most amazing example of an economic boom to bust I've ever seen.
What you have seen is the effect of too many players in a speculative market. Almost nobody pays $3000 for a game console. The rumor of people buying them for $3000 got lots of people excited about easy money and a high mark-up. It's just like the pump and dump stocks. Nothing new here. A few consoles got bought then and sold for $1500 to another investor sucker who thought he could sell it for $3000. Not many paid $1500 to play the console.
A word to the wise, keep out of the specultation market. Very few win at the game.
The truth shall set you free!
Let's hope this product is zune to be forgotten!
;-)
"Origami".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is it just me or does MS seem to design everything by a giant committee, headed up by accountants and market-speak droids?
The seem to be used to dealing with business customers who don't understand computers and don't want or need to -- they just know that MS is the 'best of breed' and MS will take care of their every need. They have no imagination and no ideas of their own about how a computer could solve their problems, or what they want out of it -- they just want to sit down at a training course and have MS tell them how a computer works and what to do with it. They are just there for the ride, eagerly consuming whatever lowest-common-denominator crap MS pumps out.
Meanwhile, the younger kids coming up are computer savy, have a general idea of how computers work and what you can expect out of them, and most importantly what sucks and what doesn't. That's why the iPod has built such a strong brand -- not for its sleek styling, but for its user friendly interface. Instead of another button for another feature, it has *basically* one button (or two buttons, or one nested button) for *all* of its features. This is what the music listeners of today want -- an *easy* way to get to their music. This is worth repeating -- the iPod is simply the easiest path to their music. That's all.
Meanwhile, the MS zune seems to be designed to please music labels and MS' own need for vendor lock-in, with its DRM, shoddy music store, and crappy sharing features. Go ahead, please everyone but the customer who you expect to pay for the privilege of using your crap. Though I must admit, it does work well in the business world.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Not if the reviews of the Wii are any indication...
"Sufferin' succotash."
"...I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count."
You're kidding, right?
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Ring any bells?
Well, I'd never buy anything with lines like "Welcome to the social" on it anyway. I still have really hard times accepting it as being valid unfunny English with a meaning.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
To be outsold by iPod is to be expected. To be outsold by Sandisk is a spanking.
That has jack-all to do with the fact that they're a monopoly (in office and OS software, not MP3 players, by the way) and everything to do with the fact that they have a lot of money.
Their being a monopoly elsewhere has very little direct impact on this product, just like it has very little direct impact on the Xbox 360 or on MS' hardware business. (Are they still doing that?) All their monopoly (and busines in general) does is FUND these ventures. Any other large company could do the same thing- Sony, for example.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Why thank you.
To answer the post though, I was talking about the market's first impressions as opposed to mine or Taco's. Quite frankly if the market shared my first impressions, they would achieve the first ever recorded negative sales figures in history. However, the iPod actually did quite well to begin with. There was an initial lag period when it first came out during which it sold moderately well, but then after about eight months it began to rise hugely. Now this could sound reassuring to the Zune lovers (are there any outside Redmond?), but with the iPod, Apple were breaking fairly new ground. MP3 players weren't as prevalent as they are today and nothing quite like the then new iPod was. So that lag time is the technology gathering acceptance, filtering into public awareness, etc. That work is done now and . The Zune is treading old ground and ought to start off with an advantage because of that. But from this story it isn't exactly taking a big chunk of those who are buying their first MP3 player. Furthermore it's trying to break into a very established market whereas the iPod had territory which, if it was fooling around with boys, still had its virginity intact for a little longer. But Jobs has popped that particular cherry and is now in a pretty steady relationship. If the Zune were to steal the girl as it were, it would need to have done better than this.
It has the backing of Microsoft. It probably wont die. But it's not going to be anything amazing and the one good feature it has is crippled with DRM. Others will replicate it soon enough and hopefully in a better way. As phones, PDAs, MP3 players et al., become more and more integrated, there's not going to be a future for an MP3 player that boasts "Hey, I can do wireless."
IMHO, of course.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Actually the wife and I have the Sandisk e270 and an 4gig iPOD nano. We both argue over the Sandisk, the nano is the consolation prize.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.