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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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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."
Microsoft Money never crushed Quicken
Actually, the story of how the Empire tried to eat Intuit's lunch is quite an interesting one. They pretended they wanted to buy them out, crawled all over the place ostensibly for their "due diligence" for the buyout, and then went off and wrote an app implementing Intuit's product plan for Quicken 4. When Intuit realized they'd been had, they jumped one product generation, and went ahead with what they'd planned to do in Quicken 5. MS Money hit the streets just a couple of months before Quicken got their next version out.
Over the next year or two, MS tried the usual trick of bundling their product with the OS to try to kill Intuit, but that just convinced the customers that MS Money was a throwaway. Also, financial records are something that you REALLY don't want to leave up to a microsoft product. I know accountants who still use Lotus 123 because they don't trust Excel.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's not wrong at all. They're pointing out Microsoft's failure to rise to the occasion in the face of stiff competition.