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A Million Zunes Sold
According to Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of the Entertainment and Devices Division, Zune has already met the goal of 1.000.000 players sold, set at launch for the end of June. He also confirms that new Zune things will come in this fall, talks (not) about the Zune Phone, the new Watermelon Red Zune, the Zune Marketplace and of course Xbox 360.
...and don't forget - there's four less iPods in circulation since they put out that 'Bite Me' display unit.
who bought these? i don't know anyone in the uk who has a zune.. for that matter i don't know anyone who has even SEEN a zune. did ms employees buy these at a knock-down rate?
Why UNIX?
I've only been holding off on buying a Zune because of the colour.
Now, at long last, a Watermelon Zune! It's as hip as a watermelon, and twice as easy to use!
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Has anyone ever been somewhere and seen more than say three in a five minute span?
I could've said the same thing for the iPod back when they hit their first million. It's still less than 1% of the total US population, let alone the world.
I actually see many Zunes in use in the D.C. area (most of them are used for watching missed episodes of Lost, 24, and Heroes)
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Riddle me this Slashdot: Why is it that when a product achieves ... ...10% of the MP3 player market, it is less than an also-ran. ...10% of the browser market, it is a signal that the world is changing. ...10% of the OS market, it is news that would rival the second coming of Christ.
(Hey, put down that Troll mod -- part-time Linux-based programmer with an iPod here... Really.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
A million zunes sold, and 250,000 returned because they weren't ipods.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'd hoped that the Zune would be a stronger competitor to the iPod, offering things Apple didn't and raising the bar on portable players generally.
As a fan of Apple, I'm keen to see better players in this space to drive everyone up. It's good to see Microsoft claiming the million players sold, but the Zune as it stands today is a turkey. The innovative wireless sharing has been hobbled by unnecessarily draconian DRM, leaving a weak offering. Maybe Zune 2 will be better, but it's a failure to release a poor first showing, as now we've all got this first impression to overcome.
I'd like to see Microsoft release a really solid Zune. Promises are worth exactly nothing; only products matter.
At least it seems to be selling better than Vista!
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
We all know MSFT counts something as sold the day it leaves the warehouse, not the day it leaves the store.
I know more people with Archos products (2) than Zunes (1).
1,000,000 sold to vendors perhaps? Sold to customers might be different but if there are 1 mil Zunes on shelves or in stock out there M$ can claim "million sold."
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
The thing is one million may sound like a lot to us, but it is really a drop in the bucket compared to mow many mp3 players there are out there. iPods have sold how many million? I still see more generic players (Sansas etc) around my area than genuine iPods. MS is trying to establish the Zune as a brand which may or may not happen. To do so they will have to sell 10's of millions and then you might see one. MS does have the staying power to wait. If the thing fails, at least they have a tax write-off. In the meantime, the reason they want in is the sheer size of the market. Not unlike the iPhone which Apple figures will make a go of it with single digit market penetration. A million is probably true, but in percentage of the market it is insignificant.
>>A million zunes sold, and 250,000 returned because they weren't ipods.
Another 700,000 are just sitting on the store shelves collecting dust. Actual sales to consumers - 50,000.
That's MSFT style accounting for you. 40 million Vista license sold, yet that included the two months before christmas when they started giving away vouchers.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
After the iPod amnesty at Microsoft I would imagine they have finally reached this target.
I am reluctant to believe that 1M Zunes were sold through to consumers as opposed to sold to retail. Microsoft pulled this same stunt in December to meet their 10M Xbox 360 goal. They essentially flooded the retail channels with 360s, many of which are still on the shelves today. The question is, how many Zunes did they dump into retail to meet the 1M goal?
of course, it's binary
It can be simplified further:
* If we like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share is major news which is accepted without further questioning of the facts as presented. Comments on article consist of lots of pats on the back and generally positive.
* If we don't like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share involves questioning the facts as presented. Insert long diatribes about unfairness of past behavior. You can even make statements that conditionally apply, i.e. "monopolies are bad. Except for the iPod, they earned it!"
The funny part is you have a bunch of posts nitpicking over the 10% mark: "there's no way the Zune has 10%!" Yes, way to miss the entire point of the post.
it's 1,000,000 patents infringed and 235 Zunes sold
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
What is Steve Ballmer's uncle going to do with 1000000 zunes?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The only reason I bought a Zune was because I thought it would have linux on it a few months after launch. I thought to myself "Ipod fans have had Rockbox and ipodlinux for ages so why not Zune?". Big mistake. Microsoft have gone out of their way to prevent third party firmware being loaded on by only accepting Microsoft signed firmware. Its such a shame. Think about what could be done: wireless syncing, actually sharing songs between other Zune users (not that 3 songs in 3 days crap), gapless playback, proper video format support (not just wmv) etc. It could have been good...
Because the Zune has not achieved 10% of the market. If you read the marketing speak carefully, they said they have achieved 10% of the market in which they compete. The Zune has 2.9% of the MP3 market and ranks #5. They have 10% of the hard drive market only.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
'' I hate the iTunes DRM. I hate the Sony CD's rootkit. I hate the DRM files in Rhapsody/Napster. Why is it that we never hear about those much anymore? Don't we all HATE them with every fiber of our being? ''
There is not a single song with DRM in my iTunes library. There is not a single song with DRM on my iPod. My wife got one CD-like music container which I had to import on my four year old PowerMac because the MacBook would just eject it; it was made by Sony and no "CD" sign anywhere on it. This might have been a close encounter with DRM; I don't know.
I don't hate DRM at all. I just haven't purchased and won't purchase music with DRM.
Check the UID and comment count of the "user" that submitted this story.
"this is Slashdot and you're bashing Microsoft."
l eid=CA6428719
No, he's quite correct.
Plus, I'll heap some more numbers upon you, just out of spite.
Apple is going to sell 9.5 million iPods ending this quarter. 9.5 _million_ iPods in _one quarter_ , while it took _two_ quarters to sell 1 million Zunes.
9.5 million versus 500 thousand/quarter. Please also note that I'm splitting the Zune sales evenly between two quarters, ignoring the initial early-adopter bump. You're not going to see many Zunes, period.
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&artic
"According to the firms latest report, global PMP/MP3 player unit shipments will rise to 268.6 million units in 2011, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent from 128.7 million units in 2005. In 2007, player shipments are expected to rise to 216.9 million units, up 21.8 percent from 178.1 million in 2006, iSuppli said."
So the market is going to grow by nearly 39 million units _this year alone_ and the Zune will be 2 million of that, roughly. That's not enough to be visible.
--
BMO
Who does Microsoft sell to? That is the question. Have you been in a Microsoft store lately? Microsoft sells to retailers. How many Zunes are in retailers wareshouses awaiting retail sale? I bet the sales guy gets a pretty good spiff for selling a Zune over a Zen.
My daughter away in school wanted a Xen Video. We went to a retailer and asked for one. The salesman convienently heard me say Zune. They acted like they didn't know what or where the Zen's were. Either I got a real diwit for a salesman, or they were blinded by the possible spiff for selling a Zune. The store did have Zen's, but were sold out of the video model.
The truth shall set you free!
Of course this all depends on if you can believe a fanboy site.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Looks like quite a few of you skipped church on Sunday, because the Microsoft groupthink has been split down two separate veins of baseless conjecture today:
1) 1 million Zunes sold is a drop in the bucket. A DROP IN THE BUCKET I SAY!
Yeah, and this story wasn't about the Zunes market dominance - it was about a MS official stating they met their internal targets of 1 mllion by the end of June. But good lord, for every anecdotal story you have of not knowing anyone who owns a Zune (statistically likely since they have only sold a million units), there is someone else who does. I personally have one friend who owns one, and he seems to enjoy it.
2) Microsoft obviously fudged the numbers! The Zune is crappy, there is no way!
A lot of you are making jokes about how they massaged this number, or how it's probably a million units shipped to retail, but you have nothing to back this up at all, just like you didn't with the Vista license sales stories. Just baseless conjecture sprouting from the basic Microsoft == Evil truism. If they somehow admit to faking the numbers, then string them up accordingly.
Honestly though - take a scroll through all of the comments in this story, and you will cringe. And this is coming from someone who is a happy 3rd Gen iPod owner, and who isn't interested in the Zune in the slightest.
Don't buy their product if it doesn't have what you want, but all of this foaming at the mouth hatred for everything they do or release seriously hamstrings your credibility.
- Scott
You separate how many sold THROUGH (to consumers) versus how many were sold IN (to retailers)
FWIW, I used to work in a retail store that sold zunes and other MP3 players and we never got spiffs for zunes despite the fact that other companies offered stuff like that (Helio Phones always gave a pretty good spiff). Maybe he is just a zune owner and wants to "squirt" your daughter.
People in the industry like to break up the market into "hard drive" and "flash" segments.
And then the people at M$ like to just make up a number that sounds big and an excuse for it that sounds good but is wrong. It's called lying.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I work in a school, and what the kids carry around in their backpacks is a pretty good indicator of the general popularity of the product.
So far, most popular things I see in kids hands are iPods, PSPs (the little kids have Nintendo DS lites) and every type of cell phone on the planet.
This year, I only saw one kid with a Zune. She said she was sorry she bought it since all the accessories she wanted to buy only worked with iPod.
So if kids (or their parents) aren't buying Zune, who is?
-ted
DRM issues aside .. DRM sucks; but I think it's overblown.
If the zune was 1/2 the thickness - or thinner than an ipod - I wonder how much better it would have performed in the market. The current size is on par with what I'd expect 7 years ago from a early ipod. That's an engineering challenge much more difficult than making a portable brick that plays movies.
I've watched the form factor issue destroy Palm, now the marketdroids at microsoft have missed this mind boggingly obvious fact - thin and light is sexy.
..don't panic