Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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?
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
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.