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A Million Zunes Sold

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the zero-sold-to-anyone-i-know dept.

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.

42 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. but ... by eneville · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:but ... by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You realize that a million isn't much right in the grand scheme of populations right?

      In the UK, if a million were sold there you'd have a 1/54 chance [or so] of knowing someone who owned a Zune. In Canada, it'd be about 1/32 or so. And given that I don't regularly hang out with 32 peeps [assuming all were sold in Canada though...] it's not surprising me that I haven't seen one.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:but ... by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah... The Zune is something you only show to your very closest friends, amongst nervous laughter, as you explain to them the embarrassing chain of events that led you to buying it.

      So, if you have less than a hundred very close friends, you're not likely to have seen one.

      --
      - These characters were randomly selected.
    3. Re:but ... by $pearhead · · Score: 5, Informative

      i don't know anyone in the uk who has a zune..
      That might have something to do with the fact that it has not been released in Europe yet.
    4. Re:but ... by spisska · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've found that Ogg Vorbis offers noticeably better fidelity than mp3 at comparable comression. It's not something that you can easily hear with a portable player and cheap headphones, but on quality gear the difference is obvious.

      Ogg is much, much better at preserving the character of high-frequency sounds and overtones (think cymbals and strings), and much more faithfully preserves dynamic range. Again, this won't make much difference on the train with your ipod ear buds, but run it through a decent sound system and the mp3s just sound muddy. And when it comes to Classical music, mp3 is nearly useless. Ogg does a decent enough job of it, but I still keep Classical and many Jazz recordings in FLAC.

      From what I understand, the lack of Ogg support on many players stems less from commercial or legal concerns (patent issues vis a vis Fraunhofer notwithstanding) than from technical issues. Ogg needs more juice to decode, which means needing stronger processors, better means of heat dissipation, and a necessary hit on battery performance. Not that it can't be done, but it requires more expensive components and shorter battery lives.

      But the lack of Ogg support on the ipod is not a huge deal. I wish it were there, but that doesn't stop me from transcoding from Ogg (or FLAC) to mp3 for the ipod and keeping the Oggs and FLACs on my Myth system.

      I do favor open source whenever possible but am no fanatic. I am, however, a musician, and sound quality is as imortant as, or more important to me than portability. Especially when portability is so easy after the fact.

      And I think it's pretty stupid of you to not realize that other people may do things diferently than you, and they're not wrong because of it.

      As far as the Zune claims go, I don't buy it for a minute, any more than I buy the claim of 40m Vista licenses sold.

      I take the el to work in Chicago, and every day I see dozens of people with ipods. I've yet to see a single Zune in the wild, and at retail outlets like Microcenter or Target there always seems to be a crowd of people looking at the ipods on display while the Zune is simply ignored. I don't think I've ever even seen a working Zune on display -- they're always off or broken.

      Microsoft's numbers don't mean a thing. The numbers to look at are from retailers: How many Zunes have been sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.? It's certainly not as high as Microsoft would have you believe. No matter what color they make it.

    5. Re:but ... by dirk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As far as the Zune claims go, I don't buy it for a minute, any more than I buy the claim of 40m Vista licenses sold.

      I take the el to work in Chicago, and every day I see dozens of people with ipods. I've yet to see a single Zune in the wild, and at retail outlets like Microcenter or Target there always seems to be a crowd of people looking at the ipods on display while the Zune is simply ignored. I don't think I've ever even seen a working Zune on display -- they're always off or broken.

      Microsoft's numbers don't mean a thing. The numbers to look at are from retailers: How many Zunes have been sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.? It's certainly not as high as Microsoft would have you believe. No matter what color they make it.
      So because you haven't seen one of a million Zunes sold in the world you don't buy it? Yes, you have seen iPods, because they have sold over 2 orders of magnitude more. They have sold a total of 100 million iPods (according to Apple), so of course you have seen an assload more of them. I have never seen an iPod video outside of a store, but I am willing to accept that they have sold a whole lot of them.

      As far as MS only selling a million Zunes in this time, that is exactly what they expected. They realized they were moving into a new market with a dominant force in it (Apple). They are trying to get their foot in the door, get their product known, and slowly increase sales. It is similar to what they did with the original XBox. They knew they wouldn't go in and take over the market. Instead they go in, take their lumps and slowly build a base and a better product.

      --

      "Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
    6. Re:but ... by nwbvt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well I don't know anyone who owns a John Deer tractor, does that mean all the ones that are sold are being bought by people working for the company?

      Sheesh, when will you people learn that your circle of friends and contacts are not at all representative of the population as a whole...

      And to be honest if you have never even seen a zune, that must mean you havn't set foot in an electronics store recently (assuming they are distributing them over there in the UK as heavily as they are over here in the colonies), which means you probably wouldn't know too many people that owns one.

      --
      Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
  2. Finally! What I've been waiting for! by Z0mb1eman · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Finally! What I've been waiting for! by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm waiting for the Grapefruit Zune, because then I'll know that the squirting feature works like it should...

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    2. Re:Finally! What I've been waiting for! by Tickletaint · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Only because the color is emblematic of everything else wrong with the Zune. Skin it all you want, but the Zune is still hobbled by Microsoft's staggering failure to "get it."

      --
      Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
  3. Really? by villaged · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The only time I have ever seen one in the wild is when a Microsoft SE was using one.

    Has anyone ever been somewhere and seen more than say three in a five minute span?

    1. Re:Really? by spooje · · Score: 3, Funny

      Pdeople are probably too embarrassed to use them in public.

      --
      Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
  4. 10% of $product market... by patio11 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:10% of $product market... by Headcase88 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I like that point but I'm pretty sure Zune doesn't have 10% of the MP3 player market by a long shot.

      --
      "When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
    2. Re:10% of $product market... by nanosquid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not the market that makes the difference, it's the company. In the past, Microsoft has been able to kill competitors simply by announcing a product, and if that wasn't enough, they'd follow it with billions in marketing and loss leaders. Microsoft wanted to make Zune a big success and they have failed; it's just another clunky Microsoft product that may or may not sell enough to break even eventually.

      OTOH, when other companies achieve 10% market share against a convicted but unrepentant monopolist with billions of dollars in his war chest and an army of lawyers, yes, that is big news.

    3. Re:10% of $product market... by berj · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're off by almost as much as the original poster.

      1/100 = 1% not 0.1%

      The only way to get down to 0.1% is if the iPod only had a 10% share of the overall MP3 player market. I'm pretty sure the iPod's market share is something like 60 or 70 percent.

      soo..

      100/.6 = ~166 million total MP3 players

      1/166 = zune market share of 0.6%

    4. Re:10% of $product market... by RodgerDodger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      10% of the market = 10% of the units sold in period (7 months from start of December to end of June). We're talking the hard-disk-based players here, BTW, as per the interview.

      Apple doesn't have a market share of 100 million iPods. They've got an _installed base_ of 100 million iPods. During the first three months of '07, Apple sold 10,549,000 iPods - but the Shuffle and the Nano don't count (flash-based). Let's assume (for the sake of argument) that about half the iPods Apple sell are the HD models, and that they'll sell about the same again the April-June period. So you're looking at about 8-10 million HD iPods sold in the period described. Suddenly, a 10% market share for the Zune selling about 1 million in the same period isn't unrealistic.

      I think we can assume that the Microsoft guy got the size of the market right - he may be exaggerating sales by including units still in the channels and not with customers, but the size of the market is right.

      Still, I don't know who buys these things. But then, I don't think MS sells them in Australia yet, so that's hardly surprising for me.

      --
      "Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
    5. Re:10% of $product market... by DECS · · Score: 3, Informative

      The OP is right that Apple has sold 100 million iPods over the last ~6 years (since 2001), but what is interesting is that the company has sold about 70 million of those IN THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF. That's why the installed base graph looks like a population explosion curve (just like Apple's stock price).

      By (fiscal) year, Apple sold this many iPods:
      2002 381,000
      2003 939,000
      2004 4,416,000
      2005 22,497,000
      2006 39,409,000
      2007 31,615,000 (the two fiscal quarters ending in March 07)

      So Microsoft's sales of 1,000,000 would be impressive if it had actually sold that many to consumers. The fact is however, that Microsoft reports sales by counting how many units it has pushed off on retailers. Microsoft reported sales of 10 million Xbox 360s last fall, after only selling 6 million to users. It continues to push retailers to take deliveries of units to create the appearance that the 360 has not reached saturation, despite little new growth. Given that it could dump 4 million 360's on retailers last fall, it's actually a pretty dismal failure that Microsoft can't manage to similarly fake sales of 4 million Zunes, even without ever selling one. If it can only mange to announce meeting its stated goal for June, it doesn't even care anymore. This is a very dead product.

      Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
      iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
      Next Gen Sales - Q1 2007 - Zune, Xbox, PS3, Wii, Apple TV

  5. Re:And I still don't know anyone who owns one.... by peragrin · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  6. Is the Zune a Player? by GaryPatterson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Nice by Tuoqui · · Score: 3, Funny

    At least it seems to be selling better than Vista!

    --
    09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
    +2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
  8. Sold? or Shipped? by Basilius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  9. Best Buy, Comp USA, Wal-Mart? by Bayoudegradeable · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Best Buy, Comp USA, Wal-Mart? by ivan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      NPD data isn't Microsoft data, and unless every user registers their product Microsoft doesn't know how many were "sold" to end users. They don't much care either. They don't sell Zunes to end users. They sell them to distributors and retailers. If they collected money for a million units, they've sold a million units. If every WalMart, Target, and BestBuy still has 4 on the shelf, Microsoft still "sold" a million units, even though only half of that is in the wild. This article doesn't mention NPD data at all.

      Not that it matters anyway. Saying you've sold a million at this point is admitting defeat. Apple sold that many players last week. A million in almost a year is horrible and complete failure.

  10. Re:They're catching up, then... by neoform · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Catching up? Maybe..

    Catching on? No.

    They *still* haven't bought the domain zune.com, talk about stupid.

    --
    MABASPLOOM!
  11. Probably true. but... by Bullfish · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:Same with the ipods back when they hit 1 mil. by FonzCam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not that iPods were more visible among certain subcultures, it's because the iPod is more visible because of those bright white headphones. People advertise the fact that they are using an iPod. If you saw someone walking down the street listening to a Zune you'd probably think it was an iPod with 3rd party headphones.

  13. 1000000? by meta+coder · · Score: 5, Funny

    of course, it's binary

    1. Re:1000000? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      64 Zunes should be enough for the market....

  14. Nice! by mattgreen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  15. Re:Same with the ipods back when they hit 1 mil. by FatherOfONe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I strongly disagree. I don't ever notice what headphones people have but I look at what MP3 player they are listening to and I can say that I have never seen ANYONE using a Zune. I work in I.T. and am surrounded by a few Microsoft lemmings and yet none of them have even jumped on the bandwagon yet. Some of them won't buy an Ipod out of their hatred of Apple, but yet won't buy a Zune.... That says a lot.

    I am willing to bet that Microsoft has around 50 to 60,000 employees and contractors and that a majority of these went to friends and families at a huge discount or free.

    I challenge the 1 million sold and say that it is 1 million sold to distributors. I say that Microsoft is channel stuffing much like it did with the 360 and that the sales are probably far closer to 500k than 1 million. At 500k there will be "some" people here on slashdot that know someone who has one, but the vast majority of people won't have seen one in the wild.

    Please note that I am NOT saying the Zune is a bad product, I am just saying that it isn't really at 1 million units in the wild.

    --
    The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
  16. Question by Vexorian · · Score: 4, Funny

    What is Steve Ballmer's uncle going to do with 1000000 zunes?

    --

    Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
  17. No Linux by simonloach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  18. How much did they pay for this slashvertisement? by Ant+P. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Check the UID and comment count of the "user" that submitted this story.

  19. Re:How is this insightful? by bmo · · Score: 4, Informative

    "this is Slashdot and you're bashing Microsoft."

    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&articl eid=CA6428719

    "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

  20. Re:Reading between the lines, or what isn't said.. by Technician · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  21. Church of Slashdot by Scottoest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  22. Re:They're catching up, then... by DECS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Zune isn't a bad product "just because it's from Microsoft." It's a bad product because it's from Microsoft.

    A subtle difference. Don't confuse causation with simple correlation.

    Microsoft isn't working to make the Zune a good product, it's working to sell a bad product through FUD and intimidation, but in the consumer electronics world, MS isn't doing well at all, having lost many billions every year since 2001. If Microsoft spun its Apple-like hardware/consumer products off into its own company, it would be many times more beleagured than Apple ever was in the mid 80s.

    What's really going to be fun to watch is not how the Zune shrivels up next to the iPod, but how Windows Mobile is going to implode as soon as business customers realize that mobile phones don't have to spontaneously crash, spend 2 minutes rebooting, and offer arcane and bizarre interfaces and a generally crappy software experience. That is set to happen as soon as the iPhone hits. Not even AT&T can screw that up. That may make IT people question why they're continuing to use Windows products rather than an open operating systems based on Unix.

    This is simply Bill Gates' second pie in the face.

    Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
    iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
    Next Gen Sales - Q1 2007 - Zune, Xbox, PS3, Wii, Apple TV

  23. Industry, Markets, M$. by twitter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  24. A million? Who bought them? by zerofoo · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

  25. MS missed the form factor by xtal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  26. Re:They're catching up, then... by aichpvee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm sure microsoft has enough money to buy it. Hell, I fucking HATE microsoft and I'd still sell it to them for a hundred million or so. If they're serious about the brand they'd buy it. Or get their lawyers to cook up some reason why the current owners are infringing on their trademarks or something and sue them out of existence to get the domain.

    It shows a real lack of dedication on the part of microsoft.

    --
    The Farewell Tour II