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iPod Has Nothing To Fear From Slow-Starting Zune
narramissic writes, "Looks like Apple's iPod has nothing to fear from Zune this holiday season. In a research note published Tuesday, PiperJaffray senior research analyst Gene Munster writes that 'during its launch week on Nov. 16, Zune held the seventh spot on online retailer Amazon.com's top 10 best-selling MP3 players list, and it fell from that spot to 13 on the list only five days after launch, on Nov. 20.' Even worse, only 8% of retailers surveyed by PiperJaffray recommend the Zune to customers, while 75% recommend Apple's iPod." The article notes Apple's 5-year headstart in the portable player market and Microsoft's stated intention to invest heavily in the Zune over the next several years.
Did anybody seriously expect the Zune to gain a lot of market share?
The iPod has remained relativley the same across all releases. It still does then what it does now. It still works in generally the same way.
If Microsoft wants to touch that, they need an interface most people understand and prefer to the iPod, and they need to STICK TO IT. Ease of use and knowing the tricks to an iPod are part of what keeps people buying them again and again. Knowing Microsoft every revision of the hardware will be wildly different from the last, breaking any device-bound loyalty people have.
The thing is just plain ugly. Aside from the technical concerns (DRM, extremely limited wi-fi, sideways viewing) just look at it: brown, gray, or dull black. And it's blockier than even the 1G iPod.
As superficial as it sounds, Apple has right idea for a big seller: make it shiny, make it smooth.
Don't kid yourself. It might have sold better in the FOSS-supporting Windows market, but that's not a huge market. The Zune would have been helped by having PlaysForSure compatibility, and Linux/Mac compatibility. Ogg is going to be at best 1% of the market, and it's going to be the 1% least likely to buy anything Microsoft.
part of that long ramp-up is the simple fact that it took time for people to catch on to the idea of a portable MP3 player - from any manufacturer. Zune doesn't have that particular problem; the market is well-established.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I dare them to buy the front shelves in the Apple Stores. (There's a reason Apple has a retail chain.)
I downloaded the Zune SW with Firefox (that was an experience in itself). I then downloaded it with IE 6. Both on a XP box SP1. I was curious... the IE 6 download quikly, the firefox took a good 2 minutes.... now here is the interesting thing: the splash screen for the installon a SP 2 box has a background like a scene from Woodstock. The background on a SP1 box install that says "Zune needs an update" Your version of Windows or Zune software may need an update. Windows Vista support is comiong zoon (It can't tell XP SP1 from Vista?)... Ok the Background picture that honestly looks like.... a young oriental women being raped. Try It I am NOT making this up...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The XBox still hasn't gotten it right in terms of market acceptance.
Maybe that's because there will always be a group of people that simply won't buy an Xbox because it's made by Microsoft ?
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
MP3 players existed before the iPod and they were *commodity hardware* no less. Apple said "Screw that, this is a style item, not a pocket radio", and made the MP3 player *cool*, then charged a couple hundred dollars more than the Asian consumer electronics giants were charging. And proceeded to beat the living who-hah out of them. (The original iPod was $400 back in 2001. The Nomad Jukebox, which also had a hard drive, sold for about $250. Ever heard of it? Me neither. There were dozens of flash-based MP3 players, all capping at $250. Some of the popular models were in the $160 range.)
i ons/2100-1040_3-274821.html for a blast from the past.
See generally http://news.com.com/Apples+iPod+spurs+mixed+react
So here is the problem for Zune: there was a "portable MP3 player market". It was tiny. There is still a "portable MP3 player market", and its still tiny. And then there is an iPod market. Apple owns the concept like Nintendo used to own "video game console" (come on, how many of you have mothers who said that the Playstation was "The new Nintendo?").
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Despite what we would like to believe, the group of people who don't buy stuff made by Microsoft is very, very small. They don't make a difference.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
A loss-leader for what?
The Xbox makes sense as a loss-leader because the games themselves are a revenue stream worth chasing. But with Apple holding song prices at just-above-breaking-even level, there's no secondary sale for the Zune to loss-lead.
Apple uses the iTunes store as a value-added proposition for iPod sales, and takes its profit from the hardware sale. The music is a not-quite-loss leader for the device.
How is Microsoft supposed to carve out a profitable market by selling the hardware at a loss and making just enough on music sales to keep its online store running?
It's already pretty well understood that the hardware and legal limitations of the Zune are early shortcomings. However, I happen to think that one of its bigger shortcomings is not the player, but the advertising for it.
I've seen only one commercial for the Zune, and it was the first time I wanted a refund of my time for a commercial. All I can remember was a dog wagging its tail and the owner asking it to go outside. The Zune was never shown. As a matter of fact, I cannot really recall any advertisement where the Zune was displayed. I mean, after looking at a commercial like that, it just begs the question of WHY? Did the owner want to go outside to get a Zune? Did its dog see one and get excited about it, thus sparking a reaction from the owner to chase it or something? If I have to do a close analysis of a 30-second or less commercial, what would make me or anyone want to research further into the product, let alone buy it? The "let's-get-lots-of-interest-by-being-enigmatic" strategy for marketing and advertisement only works for ideas and philosophies, in my opinion.
Let me not even get started on what they think is "welcoming the social." I think that seeing some random Spanish (?) girl looking like she has other intentions with something cylindrical or an Asian girl seemingly fornicating (this can be looked at in so many different angles) makes me wonder what "social" I really want to be a part of. Using the verb "to squirt" to describe sending music or data doesn't help the situation either. Developers, developers, developers.
Plus, it's not like Microsoft hasn't made cool advertising before. Its advertisements for Office have been pretty interesting, and so was its commercial for Windows Vista while it was still in beta. Why couldn't they do this with the Zune? Were they afraid that the RIAA would come down on them if they played a song or anything related to music?
To be fair, when the iPod was first launched, I don't remember the advertisements for it exactly but I think they centered around the same theme that Apple uses today: showing people using iPod to listen to music. They showed people dancing, jumping, freaking out, going crazy, and doing all sorts of things that have to deal with the enjoyment of listening to music. Hell, when I saw those ads I wanted to dance. Plus, the white iPod looked really cool in them. No wonder it became a chic item to have. Hell, just for kicks Microsoft could have creative around this idea. Why didn't they?
The reason Apple impresses us all is that they make devices so nice to use, that even people that claim to hate them buy them. You own one after all...
Also that the devices tend to have a lot of technical depth but hide it behind a refined interface - poke around for alternate iPod management software if you want to have more control over what happens. They have moved beyond the "Cool, I can add my own graphics" that a lot of us loved at one time and have moved into the "thank god I don't have to mess with it to use it fully'.
It's like the recent story about the Microsoft shutdown menu. Like you, they thought more choices were better but really they are not. Apple is very good at folding choices into as few choices as possible.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also, MS is not able to buy out Bungie to get an exclusive on a very highly anticipated product and use it to propel their console sales. I don't know if there is the likes of a Bungie or a Halo for the Zune. Would X-Box have had the 'success' it has to date were it not for it's exclusive control of Halo? Unless Zune buys out the music/movie labels and makes the content Zune-only, I don't think there is much they can do other than pump it, hype it, astroturf it, and sell it at a loss for years, hoping to one day have enough relevance to poison the market. If they can't control the well, they'll glady poison it so no one else can control or even share it.
Once again, Zune is NOT a product. Zune is a massive testbed for DRM that MS is examining at the behest of the music industry for subsequent inclusion in Vista.
I have around 400 CDs in my personal collection. (Maybe 500 now?) My all-time record was 2000 which is an absolute pain in the ass if you actually deal with the physical media.
Many years ago-- while I was in the military-- I got tired of carrying around all the stupid plastic cases and migrated all my music to alphabetical CD binders. It was never an optimal solution for me because buying a new cd meant yanking all the discs out of the binder and shuffling them around to keep things easy to find. The binders were fairly difficult to use and were extremely dangerous to take on the road without a copilot to play DJ.
CDs in these binders seemed to be on a fast track to destruction. It was easy to scratch the surface of a CD with the zippers if you weren't careful. I once forgot a binder in the back of my car and warped approximately thirty CDs. A friend sat on one of the binders and shattered the first three pages of CDs... so on and so on. Lots of hassles I really hated to deal with but it was either binders or dead weight.
When computers caught up to CD ROM media in realtime playback with enough fidelity for me to stand the acoustic tradeoff I bought a few large swappable drives and started ripping my audio to mp3. I used UDF formatted CDRW's to dump MP3's to a Sony ATRAC/MP3 cd walkman for the times I wanted portable music and had my home computer as a permanent jukebox system. (I tried the Sony way and found ATRAC to be both cumbersome, slow and inferior.) The whole process was extremely time and labour intensive and involved numerous software packages that were never really designed to work together.
I managed with this setup for a few years until I found CDEX. CDEX automated a lot of the process of sorting rips by artist, album, and track. I was still bound to the "ghost" of physical media because I still had to shuffle albums on CDRW to be able to listen to whatever I wanted at any given time. I also had to plan my musical selections in advance. I did this for a couple of years and although not happy with the system, it worked so I made do. I never actually thought I wanted an iPod. I thought people who bought them were dumb. I basically thought "What the fuck do I need another MP3 player for? I've already got one."
One weekend I was at a friend's lake house. He had brought his laptop and a USB drive he used for his iTunes library. I'd brought a few new CDs I hadn't stripped from their cases yet and I brought them in so we could all listen to them. While we were listening to the first one he took the rest of the CDs and stuffed one into his laptop drive. (This wasn't to steal music... We were drinking and didn't want to fuck with having to change CDs every 30 minutes in a single-slot deck.) iTunes popped up and sucked the music into his USB drive and then spit out the CD. He worked his way through my stack, made a few clicks to set up a play list and then hooked up his iPod and synced to the library. Then, he dropped the iPod in a dock and started the playlist he'd just created.
(This was all on Windows, by the way. Not that it really matters to this story but there wasn't any fanboy Mac drug dealer peer pressure.)
At the time, I basically ignored the player. I already had an MP3 player but I wanted iTunes. All that work I did keeping my music portable and sorted... Gone. I was floored. What would have taken me hours to do even with CDEX helping me sort took minutes with iTunes. When I went home, I immediately downloaded iTunes and migrated my existing MP3 library over. Since I had been meticulous about ID3 tags the library imported without any user invervention other than me saying "yes" when iTunes asked if I wanted the program to keep my music sorted for me. I then spent the next two days filling in the gaps in my mp3 library. I didn't actually own an iPod but the ease of dealing with both physical media and also purchasing new songs virtually is what really sold me. I'd given up on the tactile fulfillment in handling packaging long ago so migrating to digital-on