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."

Comments

this product... not so much

[yagu]

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.

Re:this product... not so much

[znu]

Listening to music can be social.

Jobs on Zune's sharing feature:

I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Jobs gets this stuff. Think this through. Compare the Bill Gates solution (have people navigate through menus and beam music to other people's players across the room) with what Jobs is proposing. With what Jobs proposes:

1. You've creating physical intimacy through close physical proximity.
2. You're listening to the same song at the same time. It's a shared experience. That isn't necessarily so with the Zune approach.
3. You both have an ear free, so you can actually talk.

Now, there are comments in response to this Jobs quote all over the Internet to the effect of "I don't see the point, you can do the same thing with the Zune." I suspect astroturfing, because the point is obvious: this Zune feature, the only thing is has going for it, is a complicated technological solution to a problem that people have solved in better ways without the technology.

Well, I'm sure surprised.

[jcr]

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

here's the thing...

[spirit_fingers]

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.

Re:Welcome to the social?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wasnt for slashdot, i wouldnt even know what a zune is.

Re:Welcome to the social?

[countach]

To be outsold by iPod is to be expected. To be outsold by Sandisk is a spanking.

Re:First pun!

[h4rm0ny]

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. ;)