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.

Comments

Zune has so much promise

[Buzz_Litebeer]

Unfortunately the Zune seems to offer very little, and the feature that it should be known for takes a LONG time to implement. Sharing a song with another zune is as easy as the path the pinball takes on the sesame street number song.

It takes like a minute to share (squirt) a zune song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpHzQYKDlWU [youtube.com]

The thing I was wondering is this. I do not mind the squirting feature, it seems neat and probably could have been implemented in a more intuitive way (IE have a squirt button instead of traversing 3 menus and a submenu) but the idea itself is "ok." Though I do have a problem with "squirting" a song in reference to a player that looks like it was molded in shit.

So they have some possibilities for cool features! They have wireless... why do they not leverage it in more interesting ways.

As you can see in the video they can see other zune players, in fact it seems incredibly intuitive.

Now lets say that it is true wifi and could probably support 5 or 6 streams coming out of it... why do they not have some kind of "Zune broadcast" feature were people can look at zunes, see what they are broadcasting or who they are listening too, and let people tap into the music that way... maybe even have some sort of re-broadcast peer to peer feature were each zune re-broadcasts what it is playing if someone wants to listen to the same song...

This way if you knew a lot of zune friends you could have them sample the song before you squirt it into their zune... though even talking about the zune and squirting makes me kind of uncomfortable.

Also, since it has wifi, why do they not provide a program that lets your computer do the same thing... IE submit to someones current audio stream.

This is even "better" than bringing an ipod to a club and having them plug it in, you just bring your zune in, start your stream and the DJ could link into it. OR you could go to your house, have your computer plugged into a nice sound system, and have it plug into what your zune is playing, this would allow you to use the zune as sort of a music remote control were you have a nice interface in your hand.

Or it could be used the other way around, the computer could transmit music and the zune could log in and see the music being transmitted... Microsoft even has Media center edition which would be perfect for this kind of thing, or it could be a plug in to their current media player. This way people could come over, log their zunes into your computer network and listen to music rocking down the line.

Maybe internet radio, walk into a wifi cafe, set up your zune, and listen to radio streaming from a remote radio station that is on-line, NPR for example (though you might want to find one to your tastes ofc).

How about wireless synchronization with podcasts? Walk into a wifi area and hit "sync" and have it sync with all the podcasts you are behind on and then tell you which ones you haven't listened to yet.

Maybe they could work with an online video provider similar to youtube and hook up a method to stream user videos to the zune in an easy fashion, something that would nearly be a killer app for anything.

Imagine a youtube branded mediaplayer with wireless access (maybe even work with phone companies for EVDO support) were someone could log into youtube and download youtube videos right to their phone.

I mean, the possibilities are ENDLESS and OBVIOUS. You merely have to think "man what would I love to do with a wireless capable player that can be locked into a major brand and legally buy music for" etc... and it seems Microsoft chose one interesting feature to focus on and implement poorly (squirting) and then made it so that the player broke every compatibility rule that you can think of, and made a SONY mistake were it changes format and requires that you re-purchase to play.

In the end you have to ask yourself "WTF"

and note, all of this is without the criticism of making blood contracts with record companies etc... it is saying "here are the things you made me hope you would provide, then you provided... this"

iPod historical sales figures

[amightywind]

How many Windows iPods were sold a few weeks after they hit the market?

I had every intention of flaming you, but you are right. These sales figures show that it took over a year for iPod to really take off.