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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."
Hello from Seattle. Hello? Anybody here?
Let's hope this product is zune to be forgotten!
/me ducks barrage of tomatoes
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.
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
Just goes to show, Apple knows hard and black is the way to go!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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."
It was almost as if Microsoft said "Let's throw millions of dollars at a market and see if we can get a piece of it." The fact that it was trying to enter a market that is already flooded with similar products doesn't help. The fact that the Zune is incompatible with Microsoft's music files doesn't help.
This is not to say that Microsoft should stay out of consumer electronics. The Xbox 360 has a good chance of being the dominant console this generation (outside of Japan). The Zune just happens to be a waste of time and money.
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!
You mean Micro and Soft?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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
Then why is the iTunes store so popular?
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Zune;
h e_Republic%2C_Updated
It is trampling out the storage where the Costless Tunes are store'd,
It hath loosed the flaccid lighting of its terrible short release;
Its songs are marching out.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Its songs are marching out!
I have seen it in the watch-fires of a hundred wary bands!
They have builded it an altar in the circling doom and damp;
I can read its righteous screen by the dim and flaring lamps;
Its songs are marching out.
(chorus)
I have read a fiery gospel written in burnished rows of plastic;
"As you deal with my develop'rs, so with you my grace will deal,"
Let the Ballmer, born of spittle, kill the serpent with a chair;
The Zune is marching out.
(chorus)
In the beauty of the birch, Linus was born across the sea;
With a glory in his boxen that transfigures you and me;
As he hacked to make boxes holy, let us code to make Windows free;
While the Zune is marching out.
(chorus)
It is coming like the glory of the storm upon the farm-er,
It is Horror to the drummer, it is Destruc'shn to the bass,
So the world shall be its crypt, and the soul of Jobs its David;
The Zune is marching on.
(chorus)
(if you're wondering why it's re-updated, go look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_t
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
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?
-shakes head sadly- They said that when the original XBox was launched. Maybe you're right, mp3 players are a far more saturated market than consoles, and the death of the Dreamcast provided a wonderful stepping-stone with an epitaph engraved on it for them to launch from, but remember: Microsoft HAS and WILL CONTINUE to "crowbar into other markets as the fancy strikes them."
They're just THAT huge.
The work "Zune" may enter the lexicon as a word akin to Edsel or Pinto.
I heard a guy at work yesterday mentioning Sony's battery recall and commenting they "pulled a brown Zune" in terms of their marketing failure to deal with the problem correctly. (Brown being the least popular color for the Zune).
Think of the uses... "The Republicans got handed a Zune in the last election".
Where are PDAs? Haven't seen one in ages.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
Define popular. You need a point of comparison, i.e. how well it would be doing if it didn't lock people in. It might have ten times the sales figures without the crappy DRM.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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
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.
uhh, they're making kick ass smart phones, because no one owns just a PDA anymore.
my pet machine
So I take it nobody's done any squirting yet?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
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!
I'd say flaccid is a good way of describing Microsoft ;).
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
Who would buy a Rock for a Pet? yet....it happened.
There is a whole untapped market of gifts that are "not nice". I mean, what do you get someone in the family when you HAVE to get them a present, but you don't like them?
Perhaps they could do a tie-in with those new "LearnAboutCoal.org" commercials and throw Santa in there too.
SANTA: "Well, lets see little Johnny has been very Naughty this year, so he gets a lump of coal!"
Johnny: "Well at least I can burn this and keep warm for a few minutes"
SANTA: "And little Bobby has been especially naughty so he gets a Zune!"
Bobby: "Whaaaa!!!......."
[end tag]: UPS voiceover: "What can Brown do for YOU?"
I like microcars
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
Here.
Most of them seem to be very favourable.
First few days is really too early to judge a product sales figures.
I tunes has sold over 1 billion songs. I would call that popular.
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.
Britney Spears' first album sold 15 million copies in the US. With 11 tracks on the disc, that's 165,000,000 Tracks sold by a single artist on a single disc. Granted she's a very popular artist but if a single artist can make even 1/10 of the sales of iTunes on a single disc, then I wouldn't say that iTunes comes anywhere close to approaching popularity. It's just a drop in the bucket as far as music sales are concerned.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Maybe I am wrong but couldn't you simply drag the mp3s on the ipod in disk mode and then copy off the files to the new pc and import into itunes? Not quite as "slick" but perfectly effective.. oh and you can't even use the zune in disk mode?!?!? WTF is that?
So many injustices..so little time..
I remember hearing about the Origami project last year, what ever became of it?
Wikipedia says that they sold 67,641,000 iPods and 1.5 billion songs as of fourth quarter 2006. At that rate, they've sold about 22 songs per iPod.
There have been 28 different models of iPod, excluding different colors. The mean capacity of the iPod given those models is just under 18.5 gigabytes. Apple's marketing materials consider 1 gigabyte to hold 250 songs; therefore, the "average" iPod holds 4,625 songs.
Sorry, but 22 songs per iPod just doesn't strike me as a runaway success. I'm proof that the DRM is hindering sales - if it wasn't there, I'd be spending about $10 per month on iTunes content instead of $0. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I don't get why anybody would buy this when iPods are cheaper for the same capacity.
There's already a considerable ecosystem of accessories and attachments for the iPod.
It works with two open formats... mp3 and aac.
iTunes works with Mac, Windows 2K, XP, and Vista.
Does anybody want to buy this because they can send a song to a friend and he/she can listen to it 3 times. That's it? That's the feature I've gotta have? It doesn't even "Play for Sure!".
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Despite months of hype
Maybe it's because I own a Tivo, but... what hype? I haven't seen anything on TV, in magazines, on buses, etc.
And regarding the title of this thread, "Opening Zune Sales Flaccid" - do the editors' entire existences revolve around thoughts of sexual inadequacy? That's one of the silliest sentences I've seen put together anywhere. It's pathetic even by Slashdot's juvenile standards.
#DeleteChrome
There is analysis supporting that MS is now making a profit on each XBox 360 sold. It certainly would make sense given how quickly component prices fall.
the newest iTunes update has apparently made it so that if I rip a CD and put it on my iTunes, upload to my iPod, I CAN NOT pull those songs off the iPod onto another computer... EVEN IF THAT COMPUTER IS AUTHORIZED for my iTunes account!
For a self-confessed Apple fanboi, you seem to have gone out of your way to deliberately misrepresent Apple on this one. Let's clear this up for you - Apple has added a feature! Prior to this update you couldn't pull any songs off the iPod onto another computer without third party software. Now they've added a way for you to copy the purchased music to a different computer. Ostensibly, this is to facilitate backup as well as allow playback. Let me state it again - something that Apple did not allow/facilitate before has now been added. It's progress not the regression you seem to mistakenly believe...
it'll be a big hit on Woot!
Friends help you move... Real friends help you move bodies...
I must have missed all the articles where Steve Jobs attempted to subvert the creation and marketing of Zune and other competing iPod products in order to maintain the near-monopoly and crush the competition. As far as I know, iPod is successful based off it's own merits, and the dancing silhouettes.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
It's not wrong at all. They're pointing out Microsoft's failure to rise to the occasion in the face of stiff competition.
However, Ars Technica (an Apple-friendly, but fair site, IMO) gave a pretty positive review for the Zune (7 out of 10), even though they pointed out the early flaws of this product. If you're not familiar with Ars Technica reviews, they are the ones that published some rather infamous iPod reviews where they tested durability by putting an iPod in a washing machine, running it over with a car, and dropping it from a third-story balcony onto concrete (covered on Slashdot). BTW, they gave the newest iPod Shuffle 7/10 and the 2nd generation Nano got 8/10.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
We can get a littler closer to Carlin with this one:
Redomond's flaccid sales have thus far failed to prick a hole in the stiff market-share erected by those Cupertino pricks.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There is the remote/fm tuner add-on. You get a little remote to pause/play, tinker with volume, etc. It comes with some a new set of 1st gen headphones with a shorter cord (makes sense with the remote). A radio option shows up in your menu when it's connected where you can set your presets and such. My headphones wires were getting loose from all the abuse and needed replacing so I grabbed this. So I've got the FM for the gym and a remote for easy access while snowboarding. I tried it out today for my first day on the hill and it did well enough as a remote. Down side is it's $50 which is steep but really, who cares about $50 these days :)
Just sayin the nano and video ipods do have FM. It's just sold as an add-on.