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Microsoft To Exit the Zune Business?
thefickler writes "According to Microsoft's quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Zune platform experienced a revenue drop of 54 percent, or $100 million. This compares to relatively healthy sales of the iPod, which were up 3 percent in the same period (though revenue did drop by 16 percent). Obviously, with the recent job cuts at Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, pundits are wondering how soon until the Zune also gets the chop. As one pundit wrote: 'Microsoft, by now, should be realizing that it's never going to be as "cool" as Apple, so why waste its time with the Zune where it has no competitive advantage?'"
Steve Ballmer saying "squirt".
Heckuva marketing slogan, that one.
No sig today...
the "suddenoutbeakofcommonsense" tag
So there is a marked for a not dumbed doen uncool things. Sure, they are not as profitable, but it's all about the choice.
Except that the Zune, by all accounts, was uncool and dumbed down
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It's fairly easy to see why the Zune failed.
1. A mammoth uphill struggle to beat the popular and well-established iPod (as well as many other competitors)
2. The use of DRM.
3. The use of the word "squirt." Which is easily associated with bodily functions.
4. It came in brown. Which made "squirt" all the more obnoxious.
5. The lock-up issue.
No-one will miss it...
All of this (the article and our posts) are speculation, so as long as we are guessing/gossiping/conjecturing, etc.
Microsoft has indicated that they would prefer less manufacturers and models of Windows mobile based phones, so they can make the OS more tightly integrated with the hardware. There have also been rumors that Zune functionality would be folded into the phone, which tends to make sense. So my guess would be they gracefully lose, er...bow out to the iPod and say they are "providing a great combination to their customers by putting the Zune features into the phone."
no comment
Just rename it the iZune, eZune, or better yet, the ieZune...slap a Vista Capable sticker on it and it can't help selling like hotcakes!
*crickets chirping*
Well, then again, maybe not.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Nobody except this guy:
http://sydfish.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/zune-tattoo.jpg
Oh, now I see why it failed...
No sig today...
It's more about making products people want to buy. How many people really want to buy Microsoft products anymore? When was the last time we heard about people lining up to buy the latest version of Windows? The problem for Microsoft is that it has a hard time making products that excite the vast majority of the public, and they've had a few huge mistakes in public perception lately. The Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death was a just a debacle. They shipped a Zune that was less feature-filled than the then current iteration iPod. Don't get me started on Vista, "Vista Capable," and "Vista Ready," or whatever those stupid stickers said.
Sure, Apple products are cool, but they also work pretty well. Why Microsoft didn't look to Apple's or it's own playbook and more closely linked the Zune to the Windows environment is beyond me. This worked for years with Explorer.
Seriously, Xbox games are "cool." I have an original Xbox, and I have been giving Microsoft my $$$ for several years now for my Xbox Live membership. However, I'm just too stingy to give my money to Microsoft for an Xbox 360 after all the hoopla about failure rates. The race to beat Sony to the market was a failure of vision and an appreciation of paradigm shift. There was a huge market for casual gaming that just wasn't going to be satisfied by the first-person shooter, and Nintendo was able to capture it. We can chalk that up to a happy accident for Nintendo executives, but so what?
If a company tries to be all things to all people, it will be unable to do everything as well as companies that are smaller, more focused, or more nimble. Look at General Motors as example number one. Consumers have too much access to information and too many choices. The problem with Microsoft's executive leadership is that the strategic steps they take are, primarily, reactions to market forces. Then, they are placed in the position of having to respond. Why didn't anyone at Microsoft see that Netbooks might one day become popular and have a version of Vista which would run on them? No one? How long was Intel working on the Atom?
Microsoft stocks are, historically, looking pretty affordable right now, but I'm going to wait. I just don't see any game changing ideas coming out of Redmond. Until, as a company, it starts doing something much better than the competition, it will never rise to its former glory days, and its market share and/or profits will continue to decline.
Make love, not reality television.
In a bid to win back profits after huge layoffs worldwide, Microsoft UK has launched Zune MusicTurd(tm) for mobile phones.
The highly competitive music store offers tracks at twice the price, DRM-locked to a chosen individual ear of the purchaser. If they can get it to work with their phone. Microsoft were careful to point out to the financial press that charging your account, however, works perfectly and that the helpline number has been connected to a fax machine.
Microsoft is confident the MusicTurd(tm) service will attract millions of people who will buy tracks from them to play on one mobile ever, not transferable to any other device including the same phone's replacement, in preference to stores offering cheaper unlocked MP3s, and won't just drive people to filesharing networks, MP3 blogs or copying 500 gigabyte USB disks full of music from their friends in sheer disgust at these corporate tools.
"We understand that lots of people use telephones they carry around with them these days," said Hugh Griffiths, Microsoft UK head of Mobile, "and you can even play music on them. A bit like a transistor radio. Whatever will they think of next! So if we get the consumer interest, we'll offer an enhanced version, MusicTurd(tm) Polished(tm). Like we're doing with Windows 7. You can't expect it to be any good until the third version, of course. So buy the first two and it'll be fantastic. Trust us on this. We have hundreds of loyal suck, er, customers on the MSN website, I'm sure we can squeeze them until the pips rattle.
"What do you mean, I'm lacking enthusiasm for our product? You'd think I was trying to get redundancy in the next round of layoffs or something. Ha! Ha! What a ridiculous notion."
[Read the original interview. Least enthusiastic marketer in history. It was quite hard to outdo.]
[Oh, and have a Zune-Anus logo.]
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This is a good example of Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Zune had pretty good hardware at a reasonable price ... then they put (a) horrible firmware on it (b) THE WORST PC software imaginable for it (c) no way to put your own firmware on.
If they'd made it possible to reflash, a zillion Linux weenies would have bought the devices just to put Rockbox on them.
But no. Obsessive control is so much more important than actual, uh, sales. Remember, it worked for the music industry! Oh wait, it didn't.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Why not compare revenue to revenue, or sales to sales?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The entire Entertainment and Devices Division is going to get a massive house cleaning.
Zune hardware is the first step. It's the easiest to kill off. How much of stand alone portable music player market there will be in five years when so many people are starting to use their cellphones makes just throwing in the towel on the Zune hardware an obvious choice.
Killing off the eight year long Xbox fiasco is next. Microsoft has been consistently killing off or letting go first party developers for the past couple of years. The first party developers are now done to only Rare, Lionhead, and Turn 10. Not the actions of company looking long term to still be in the console market. Other none developer Xbox staff at Microsoft got axed in the recent layoffs and there is supposed to be even more dramatic changes and cuts coming soon.
So far the two Xbox products have racked up over 8 billion in losses over 8 years. Even with the poorly designed and manufactured Xbox 360 hardware Microsoft is still losing money three years into the consoles life. The Entertainment and Devices Division only barely made a tiny profit for 2008 due to absurd accounting games like having the profitable Microsoft Mac software unit placed in the Xbox's division to help hide the hardware losses.
The days of Microsoft being willing to just keep throwing money at the Xbox fiasco are coming to an end. The remaining first party studios should be gone by this year going by the rate they've been closing down or letting go their other studios. The 2 to 3 billion minimum it would take to create another Xbox isn't going to happen. Instead Microsoft will just let the Xbox die out in the market over the next couple years and milk as much money as they can out of the suckers willing to keep paying 50 dollars a year for online gaming.
(c) no way to put your own firmware on.
The other points may be valid, but- much as I hate to say it- this is irrelevant for 99.9% of the mass market I assume MS were going for.
If they'd made it possible to reflash, a zillion Linux weenies would have bought the devices just to put Rockbox on them.
No, they probably wouldn't have because it's an MS product.
And the hacker/modder/enthusiast market always overestimates its own importance anyway. Sorry to say this, but you're a relatively tiny percentage. Even if it had been massively successful in that small niche it would still have flopped relative to the mass market iPod.
Nothing wrong with spotting a niche and successfully filling it, of course. However, if your motives- and marketing budget- aim for success with the great unwashed hordes, then niche success is still a flop.
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I agree with you, I hate ipods too, mostly because I hate itunes, but I was never too crazy about the ipod itself, either. I had planned on getting a Sansa, but having a gift certificate at Wal-Mart, I had to choose between a Zune and an iPod. I really like my Zune, though. I've never had any problems with the player, although the software on my pc, since version 2, has been a major headache. I can't figure out what could possibly be uncool about the Zune, other than the fact that Microsoft makes it and it's brown (which is actually an "in" color right now, except for technology). I don't see how the term "dumbed-down" can really even apply to an mp3 player. How advanced can you expect it to be? I seriously, honestly think that 80-90% of the people dissing the Zune have never even used one, and are just jumping on the Hate-The-Zune wagon, which itself is simply riding on the bigger Hate-Microsoft wagon, which is more like a mobile city than a wagon. But having owned both the Zune and iPods, I would make the same choice again.
And about the Zune having DRM (is what I heard), I don't really understand that because it comes with a built-in wireless system so you can share your music with any other nearby Zune. Which seems like the opposite of what DRM is trying to accomplish. I have yet to see an iPod that does that.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Windows got the market by price, not by opening up new frontiers.. They copied a lot of stuff from the Mac.. Just iimplemented it on a platform that became affordable to more users than the Apple hardware/software.
Then their 'hammering away' wasn't actually technical; they employed marketing campaigns, misinformation, and even error messages in their products to scare people away from competition (c.f. the old messages in windows 3 when you ran it on a competing DOS)..
MS doesn't (historically) play the 'competition' game.. It plays scorched earth tactics. Find a market it wants to play in.. Throw endless money at it, pushing products out for less than a commercial competitor in only that market can afford (c.f. IE vs Netscape, and other similar events in other markets). Wait until said competitor is dead, then lock it in, and perhaps charge more for the product afterwards, or let it stagnate and put no further development in, killing the development of a whole market.
In the iPod battle, it's Apple, not Microsoft, which pushes to new areas (all the functionality of the iPod touch, the ease of use, so on, so forth).. MS had the almost killer app in there with their wireless sharing, but with its limitations, nobody would have been that enthused about it..
So, MS did their usual "throw money at it, and see what sticks", Apple did design work, and targetted their resources and worked out what people would want to see..
There's a point at which you decide to cut your losses and run. MS have been trounced solidly on all fronts on this one. Now that MS seem to actually have to worry about money (wonder how much they lost in the market crashes), seems this loss maker that isn't going anywhere soon would be a good cut, rather than other areas that actually make a profit.
Wars are won (or at least not completely lost) by not fighting on too many fronts, especially ones where you're getting solidly thrashed by overwhelming opposition. Sometimes a ceasefire, or strategic withdrawl can save the whole show, rather than throwing everything you have in every direction.
It was doomed from the start and here is why. Most MS products do not stand on their own. They are either riding on someone's coattails initially or shoved down people's throats (e.g. DOS and office and explorer). This is usually through corporate sales which a bribeable. Zune had to stand on it's own but had no legs.
I don't see what anyone could possibly think was wrong with the Zune logo.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
No product aimed at the zillion Linux weenies is ever going to be commercially successful. The reason is that there aren't a zillion Linux weenies. There probably aren't even 100,000 Linux weenies that would buy an MP3 player just so they could reflash it.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
PCs for the most part aren't about fashion. PCs, for the most part, are for businesses and should be boring and un-distracting (and part of the problem with Vista is they forgot this, and blinged it out at the expense of hardware).
As well as administering Linux and BSD systems, I also admin a couple of Win2K3 servers. I sort of like Win2K3, because it's crushingly boring and just gets the job done. Once I've set up the scripting environment how I like it, I hardly notice it's there. That's how a business OS should be. Windows should be dull, and prior to Vista it was dull and that's why businesses liked it - stick XP on your AD domain, and begone Teletubbies theme. It should fade into the background. It should not be giving me an "experience" (how I hate that word when applied to an OS). At most, 3D and transparency effects should be subtle and a visual cue to the eye, not yelling "HEY LOOK AT ME, I DO TRANSPARENCY AND 3D EFFECTS!!!111eleventyone", like Vista does. Ironically, the fashion-sensitive Apple people do better in this respect than Windows. Ubuntu does better too in this respect.
But music players are another kettle of fish - for the most part they ARE fashion driven. Release a fashion disaster like the Zune promoted by a sweaty fashion disaster like Ballmer who uses the word "squirt" in relation to it, and you have a failure.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I presume you missed this.
The idea of the original posting that since MS "only" sold $100M of the devices last year they'll leave the market? Or is it that they'll leave the market because the successful iPod line is eating their lunch? Or is is because we all agree the Zune isn't "cool"?
MS has many lines of business that are under $100M in annual revenue, yet they continue on in those markets, despite not being #1 - I'm thinking keyboards, mice, MS Home Server, etc.
The Zune is a fine piece of hardware, despite the recent bru-ha-ha over the particular model that couldn't handle leap year, and I suspect that MS will lower their investment in Zune hardware development, focus on differentiation on the software side, and (likely) focus on the "self-ripped" MP3 market (as opposed to the $0.99 per-song download market.
A $100M revenue company selling MP3 devices that are tailored to the Windows platform should be a no-brainer, and I believe MS will turn it around. Having said that, my family has all iPods, despite most of our computers running windows...
Ken
I can't imagine what it must be like to work in the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft knowing that all your efforts are going to nothing more than playing accounting games to hide the Xbox disaster.
It is staggering to grasp the magnitude of the Xbox diaster when you look at it:
* Over 4 billion dollars in losses on the first Xbox hardware
* Mac Business Unit moved into the Xbox division to cover up the losses
* Absolute worst and cheapest console hardware ever created with the Xbox 360
* Online fees for everyone playing online games effectively adding 50-150 dollars in extra revenue per console
* Three years on the market
And the E&D division still was only able to post a relatively tiny profit for 2008. Take away the profitable Mac Business Unit, the Xbox online fees, and other profitable parts of the E&D division and the Xbox 360 hardware is obviously still generating huge losses.
Seriously, I've been amazed at watching the ipod over the years. They came up at 40 gig and it was quite remarkable. I bought an 80 gig model about 2 years ago when they had introduced those. But now you go to the stores and it's hard to buy a classic. They are pushing the nano.
That's usually the first sign of a product hitting it's peak in the business cycle. When they stop caring about the consumer, and start pushing the models which have the highest profit.
If I were MS, I'd stay in this market. Apple hasn't changed the ipod fundamentally since they introduced the color screen and videos.
"Gee, gone so zune?"
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
That means Microsoft have not only managed to damage to MP3 market to the extent that Apple "won", but now they're dropping out too. If I weren't convinced they were just short-term reactionary fools I would believe they had it planned all along.
What am I going on about? Well, you see, back in the days just after iPod, Microsoft introduced this thing called PlaysForSure. It was a system to provide a variety of DRM options - single track purchase, promotion with timeout, monthly fee all-you-can-eat, limited play count, and so on. This in itself would have provided a superset of the functionality iTunes provided.
(For the record, where I stand: DRM must die. Three times. Horribly. Preferably acid bath.)
Sounds great, at least from a technical and business standpoint, right? Unfortunately, just to remind us that they're Microsoft, in order to get a PlaysForSure badge on your product, and to be allowed to use the system whatsoever, you have to pass certain certification processes. That includes making sure you have a good startup time, good inter-track delay time, fast database indexing, and so on.
Still sounds great? Aha, but just to remind us they're Microsoft, they're the people that design the protocol, and they make damn sure it's near-impossible to actually implement a good player from it. The database updates and queries are so horribly defined you'd struggle to get good performance out of a proper SQL-like database running on a PC, let alone a tiny little device with 1MB RAM. The requirement to support PlaysForSure means you must use MTP protocol, which is another botched abortion of a protocol. It also requires that if you use MTP you cannot use Mass Storage, further annoying your customers and very neatly if "accidentally" meaning they don't work on Macs. And then there's the encryption itself which is so horribly over-the-top and poorly implemented (you MUST use Microsoft's libraries) that it badly impacts player performance and its battery life.
So Microsoft screw the entire non-Apple MP3 market for a couple of years. Then they bring out their own PlaysForSure player. Except it's not PlaysForSure. You can imagine the language used where I worked (and presumably other companies). They decided that it was too hard to implement their own spec, so they make a player which doesn't comply to it. It's not even in the set at all - it's totally incompatible.
After an electronics-generation of fucking up the non-Apple MP3 market, then screwing up their own solution, and now after (very likely) ditching Zune, they've basically done almost exactly the right set of steps to put Apple into a lead that will be hard to make a dent into.
I stick with my decade old opinion that you don't partner with Microsoft - you watch your back.
Agreed. People who badmouth the Zune have either never owned one (the "lol zune sux!" crowd), or have only used the original 30 GB model (aka Toshiba Gigabeat) with 1.x firmware. The second gen Zunes are fantastic and I have never regretted buying one (80 GB model) after owning several generations of iPods.
I love the FM radio as I listen to NPR at work. I love the wireless sync and marketplace, which EVERY Zune model can use, but only the iPod Touch and iPhone are able to do. I love the big, vertically-oriented screen. I love the clean navigation menus on the device. I love the ZunePad, which is quicker and way more intuitive to use than the gimmicky Click Wheel.
I also really love the Zune software. It made me appreciate just how bad iTunes really is, which most seem to be in denial about, but ignorance is bliss as they say. I have every intention of buying another Zune when this one no longer serves my purposes.
If people would get over their prejudices about Microsoft and actually try the Zune, I'm sure they would be impressed by it. MS even deleted their own name from the product (it appears only at the bottom of the "About" screen) because of the popular belief that MS can't put out a "cool" product.
tl;dr: zune > ipod
Seeing as the zune and ipod are the same price, why WOULDN'T you pick the zune?
Because there are a lot more accessories and add-ons available for the iPod.
The iPod got off to a good start in terms of market share, which led to more accessories being made for it, which no doubt influenced more people to buy it.... classic positive feedback loop. It's like the OS market back in the 90s, in reverse-- there, Windows ruled the roost and the Mac was a tiny, shrinking niche. Walk into a CompUSA back then, and nearly everything on the shelves was for Windows. The Mac section was three shelves in literally the farthest corner of the store from the entrance.
With the Zune, instead of being the 800-pound gorilla in a given market, Microsoft is finding out how much fun it is to have to compete against that gorilla.
~Philly
Until very recently, I owned and _LOVED_ a first generation Zune 30.
The Zune software makes iTunes look like an Excel spreadshet, is much lighter weight than iTunes, and includes features (group mix) that I actually like and used.
Eventually, though, I sold my Zune 30 because I was tired of having to hack it to get it work with my installation of Windows XP x64. I'll never understand why Microsoft intentionally left XP x64 out in the cold, but they did so I had to move on.
I replaced it with a Toshiba Gigabeat S60, so I essentially still have my Zune, with an upgraded hard disk size and minus the WiFi (which I rarely used anyway).
If Microsoft made the Zune compatible with XP x64 (officially), I'd be a Zune owner again in a heartbeat!
[move
So, MS only drivers, no Playforsure support and no Apple protected ACC support. Of course of this would have been a non issue if MS supported universal standards(a media player does not need customer drivers if it is just treated as removable drive) and if MS focused on DRM free music. In fact the primary driver that kept Apple in the forefront for so long is the music industry insistence on DRM and the computer industries support of that position. We will see how apple fares now that Amazon has cheaper drm free music, but I think Apple will be ok now that people are used to used going to iTunes.
But I don't think that MS has to exit the market, just remember that the pupose of MS is to provide the low cost option. The Xbox is successful because it is the cheaper than a PS3, as the xbox has no HD media capability. The Zune is not cheaper than any iPod, except for the touch, so why buy it. If a PC were as expensive than the mac, how many people would buy it? Sell a zune for $100, and it will be on the top of the charts, just like the xbox. Or they could do something innovative and include wireless cell phone access, like the Kindle, and inlcude one year of subscription service. But that would innovative, not what MS does.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here is a list of features I've found very useful on my iAudio G3 over the couple years I've owned it. Some seem obscure, and I never knew about them until I looked for them because I found a need. (I'm not saying the iPod lacks these features, since I just don't know).
Plus I have it set to work as a USB drive, and show/navigate my tracks via the directory structure (no ID3 info required). Just how I like it. And it runs on a standard AA for about a month of my typical usage.
So, I prefer lots of options, even if I never need some of them.
The Zune problem was that they started with a great idea, and then removed its testicles in committee. PMP + Wifi? Yes. Music is something humans are hard-wired to share.
Then it hits committee. Share music? That's illegal! Oh wait, it depends? Well, even if it's not illegal, we need to monetize this feature. Just like "Vista-Capable" was a good idea, until they decided to change the standards to suit their suppliers. Xbox 360? You're on the money. Committees don't see shifts. People do. And when you give a committee lots of money and say "make version II", you see something very expensive. Netbooks? Microsoft saw them coming. That's why they came up with the UMPC specification. Oh wait, you mean something cheap? Again, committee think. It's why GM cars have all the cupholders.
And about the Zune having DRM (is what I heard), I don't really understand that because it comes with a built-in wireless system so you can share your music with any other nearby Zune. Which seems like the opposite of what DRM is trying to accomplish.
Aren't those shared songs DRM-wrapped, meaning they're exactly what DRM is trying to accomplish? DRM isn't about trying to prevent "sharing", but rather about trying to control what you can do with the music you've bought.
Anyway, I don't think it's really all about the Zune being "uncool". I'm going to go out on a limb and make the following claim: The problem people have with the Zune is not the Zune itself, but rather that it's yet another lame attempt by Microsoft to take over a market that they perceive as a threat. Microsoft (rightly) perceived that the iPod was an indirect threat to their OS as well as their WMA format, and their response was to release an "iPod killer" that failed to understand the MP3-player market to a laughable degree.
Keyword graphs show the story...
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry=zune_meme_rerun
Microsoft entered a market nearing its growth inflection point with a marginal product. They thought they could win through hype and Microsoft branding.
Microsoft Vista is failing for similar reasons.
When I was in Middle School, I bought a Muvo TX FM (I think that's its name) for $30 at Wal Mart. A whopping 256MB MP3 player.
But, it has all of those features. Play by folder and not by ID3 tags (though it even supports scrolling Asian character sets for those!), a graphic equalizer, sleep-off timer, FM tuner and microphone...
I've never purchased another one. It's tiny, functions as a USB drive, and I just sync it with my computer before I leave for work (or now school) every morning. Who cares how "cool" it is if only the earbuds leave your pocket?
DATABASE WOW WOW
I have a brown Zune too. When I first got it, I absolutely loved it. 30 GB of storage, ability to play photos, videos and music either in headphones or on my TV. Then a strange thing happened... Last September I wanted to get a mobile device that allowed me to surf the web. I saw my friends' iPhones and thought it was a good experience. "No problem" I thought. I'll just check out this Windows Mobile 6 stuff. I started on a hunt to find a non-iPhone that browsed the web as well as an iPhone. I went to AT&T stores (since I had their service already though my contract had expired), Verizon stores and Sprint stores. At the time, every other phone's web surfing was a J-O-K-E compared to the iPhone. A joke. I can't tell you how much it pains me to say that, since I am in reality a Microsoft fan and have used their development products professionally for over a decade and a half.
So I got the iPhone 3G. My Zune was then in the glove compartment of my car for a few months. I pulled it out a few weeks ago to try out the Zune games that seemed to be taking off. What I used to think was a sleek, intuitive interface on the Zune now looked clunky. The entire device actually felt cheap. The Zune hadn't changed though - I did. I got used to the iPhone. But anyway, I upgraded my Zune firmware, installed the Zune Games and actually tried the default ones out. Texas Hold'em was actually fun. But man, the experience is nothing - NOTHING - like the iPhone.
I guess I'll try selling my brown Zune on eBay before they become totally worthless.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Works at what?
If you mean to say it works at hogging resources and weaseling its way into all sorts of other processes and applications where it is of dubious (at best) use, then sure, but if you mean to imply it's a better music player than just about any other option you're full of it.
As far as I'm concerned, the two single biggest drawbacks to iPods are that they cost twice as much and you actually have to install iTunes.
For the record, I still don't see what's so damned hard about making an MP3 player connect to a computer as a flash hard drive. Just let me copy/paste the files through whatever file browser I use, and skip this whole syncing nonsense if I don't want to do it. And for all the people who do (for some reason) find that their media player is the best tool for copying files onto their MP3 player, they can do so with any player they want rather than the one their player's manufacturer wants.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
This is that critical mass thing again. PlaysForSure was still early enough in the general maturity of the net that it's been kinda washed over.
But to pull that stunt *twice* makes an event that will show up at the more dangerous business-analysis-article level, and that's far harder to get away from. Also, it coincides with a strange emergence of audience maturity awareness not even present 8 years ago.
You used to form opinions about stuff from 3 newspapers and *the local retail store*. Products created their own gestalts. Something shows up new, "it was cool" ... because it showed up on the shelf.
Now we're asking each other about stuff, and *leveraging our own experts* so that the classical media begins to sound lame if they throw too much eggnog into their spinpuff.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Erase the bottom of the Z with whiteout.
7une.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
> Seeing as the zune and ipod are the same price, why WOULDN'T you pick the zune?
1. It doesn't implement the massdrive USB spec -> Not possible to use as a harddrive (which is especially bad for the large-capacity one); there are drivers to download which makes it possible but it still means I cannot just plug it into any old computer and use it for files.
2. Calendars, addresses and notes: I use this functionality, especially the notes thing where you can hyper-link notes internally and to music/video on the drive. Geeky, yes, but for me it's useful. (Caveat: I haven't tried the newest firmware for Zune so these things might be available now.)
3. I live in Europe -> Can't buy a Zune
4. I use a Mac now and then -> Can't use the Zune with it
But of course my reasons might not be interesting for you, and instead the FM radio, Wifi etc. on the Zune, and if so you should definitely avoid the iPod.
I only wanted to mention that there are actual, feature-based reasons why someone might want to get an iPod rather than a Zune. And of course this comparison is only interesting for iPod Classic / Nano; iPod Touch is something else completely. I strongly suspect that iPod Classic is not selling that much any more...
The zune was never going to be a the ipod killer that MS hoped it would be and it is difficult to see why MS entered the market.
Basically if you are going up against the gorilla that is Apple in the ipod market, you have to have something that differentiates markedly. The only thing the zune had was the wireless sharing. However two problems with that. Firstly it was hopelessly crippled by MS usually DRM fan boys. Secondly it relied on enough mass usage of the zune so that there was a chance someday you might meet another zune user. If you took that away you were left with a nice MP3 player competing with all the other nice non apple MP3 players in a sea made by Apple. And remember an ipod is not just a music player but is the focal point of a whole industry providing ipod addons. Zune never had a chance.
The question is what could compete with ipod? History has shown that it would either take a whole new technology shift(wireless music ???) or Apple to make a mis-step. So far Apple has shown they are not likely to do the latter, in fact you have to be impressed how they do not sit back and wait for the competition to catch up, but are constantly pushing the envelope. This makes it very hard to compete against. You only have to look how a few months after the zune was produced apple produced the itouch so totally changing the market before the zune ever got going.
So what about MS. Probably what they should of done instead of spending millions on Zune was got into phones. Here they have a slight advantage in that their software runs the corporate world so if they made a phone that seamlessly connected then corporate world would probably buy a few.
However even here they have a few problems. Firstly it would eat away at their mobile OS market, since they would be competing against the same people who buy there software from them at the moment. This would almost certainly push these same manufacturers to android and the like.
Secondly MS hardware sucks. They just do not have the ability to integrate the software and hardware into one unit, in the same way apple do. This must be partly to do with their reliance on 3rd party hardware suppliers to do the hardware design, then having to fit their software to it.
In the end of the day, MS should really concentrate on doing what it knows best, making operating systems for gray boxes
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Blaming Microsoft for the fact that Apple doesn't support MTP is ridiculous. Apple locked down iTunes so that you can't really use it with other players, and they tried to lock down the iPod so that you can't use it with other music management applications.
You missed my point. They specified that you can only use MTP and no other protocol. You were not allowed to have a dual-protocol device, which was perfectly possible. Of course, they eventually settled for allowing this, but not before the damage was done - vendors implemented MTP instead of the ubiquitous Mass Storage (MSC) and when you've got limited resources to do things, you settle for one protocol. So a mass of MTP devices appeared, which neatly didn't work on Mac.
And, of course, just to let us know they're Microsoft, MTP wasn't supported unless you had Windows Media player 9 installed. And of course, WMP9 wasn't supported unless you had Windows XP installed. Very neat.
I was there when this all happened and it was as obvious as a 100ft tall pink elephant. They got away with all this crap simply because the US and EU were busy with the bigger fish of browsers, openness, protocol compatibility and all the other monopolistic practices. I don't see why you should give them the benefit of the doubt here - there's decades and hundreds of examples of Microsoft doing the same thing over and over. This is no different.
As for "screwing the entire non-Apple MP3 market", I think you give Microsoft too much credit; Microsoft has had virtually no impact either way. If you want an MP3 player, there are plenty of choices that cost almost nothing.
You are wrong. If you are a non-Apple MP3 manufacturer you must go with PlaysForSure. It's a tick-box. The mass market wants tick boxes, and customers wanted P4S. If you didn't have P4S, you didn't sell. It's sad and believe me it's true. Microsoft screwed the market by crippling all the non-Apple vendors with a shitty product.
MP3 players are dead anyway; like PDAs, they are just becoming part of phones.
That is patently untrue. There are so many factors which will ensure they'll be around for years. Form factor is one. Price is a fucking obvious one too.
Also notice that the phones which list music playback as a strength have all gone with their own implementations. Notice how big the companies are that had the guts to do it: e.g Nokia. Sadly we're left with a bunch of walled-garden solutions, iTunes included.
It would be a first for them to cut failing business which was created to keep a competitor in check. Microsoft has many money losing businesses, ones which lose billions annually but their purpose is not necessarily all about being profitable, it's about limiting the growth of the market leader. Windows CE was created to slow or stop Palm's growth beyond the PDA and Microsoft has lost over $15 billion on that. The Xbox was created to slow or stop Sony from growing the PlayStation market beyond the console and Microsoft has lost many billions on that. The Zune was created to slow the Apple iPod market and they've lost a billion or two on that.
So with Steve Balmer still in charge and the Windows OS making up over 80% of Microsoft's profits and with huge profit margins, there is no history to show a willingness at Microsoft to cut any of these market protection based projects. Cutting the Zune would probably be the first one to be cut and not succeeded at its goal. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
What I don't understand is, why Microsoft hasn't (That I have seen) tried to compete on the Zune's price with the iPod. Every time I've ever looked at a Zune, it has always been more expensive than an iPod. As stated, Microsoft won't be able to compete on the 'cool' factor. But essentially, what is a Zune or an iPod? It is the size and capacity of these devices that has always been a winner.
In New Zealand (Where Zunes aren't available), you can't really get a high capacity (Over say 8/16 GB) portable media player at a reasonable price, other than an iPod. So if you're after a large capacity, small portable media device, you'll look at your options:
1) Does it play MP3s? (And this would now be, Does it play video. h.264 MPEG-4 has won that battle, so don't try to fight a format war).
2) Which is the cheapest one that supports the features I want?
Microsoft needed to under cut Apple on the price. They have deep enough pockets.
I was an early adopter and had bought one of the first RIo's. It was expensive, poorly built, had a cruddy UI, and could hold at most 15 songs at 128 K. But it was small and allowed me to have music while mountain biking. My cousin, a sales manager for a domestic high end audio company back then told me that the MP3 player to wait for would be from SONY. After all, Sony was a world leader in audio and personal electronics. They had invented the walkman. They had years of acclaimed industrial design, a mature sales and distribution network, high customer awareness, efficient marketing, and even owned a record label that would certainly facilitate a media sales conduit. So what happened? When we talk about the Zune's inability to gain market traction, I believe there are lessons to be learned from Sony. If a world leader in portable audio electronics can't make a dent, then there might be more to this than some "cool" factor or "apple sucks" reasoning.
There is no security when liberty is sacrificed.
Any Windows 7 beta user will tell you that Microsoft are definitely capable of "cool". I fully predict Win7 to be a resounding success, both in sales and in actual performance and usability terms. This is personal, but I find it to be superior to OS X even in its current beta state.
Success aside, the "coolness" of this OS could lead to a rise in the number of MS fanbois (yes they do exist). This, combined with MS's newfound "coolness" (assuming it persists), could just breath new life into their Joe Sixpack consumer products like the Zune.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
they cut Pen for Windows too but that was after they pretty much killed the one company at the time who was really building momentum, Go Inc. As far as Mac based apps go, Microsoft has very little strength or leverage on that platform. There is only Apple distributing and they have their own stores. Is Flight Sim really in a market which has or had the ability to threaten Microsoft's market position?
There is one app, Microsoft Money, which was threatened by Intuit's Quicken. Microsoft tried to tie MS Money to other products to beat Quicken but for some reason that failed. But then again, Quicken has not done anything to threaten Windows, they pretty much only support Windows and have a half effort still doing a Mac app. If they came out with a Linux version, MS would pull MS Money out or back one of the others and spend a couple of billion trying to knock Quicken down.
So while the iPod market still gets into many many Windows users hands, brings in Apple iTunes, and puts that pretty Apple logo in their mind for the next time they want a new PC. Well I just don't see them dropping the Zune. The iPod market is too big of a market threat to Windows to just leave it all alone. I don't think they'd ever drop the Xbox or MSN and their search. I'd me very surprised if they did drop it while the iPod still dominated the market.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I bought an original 30Gb refurbished Zune last year. I don't use it a lot, but when I do I enjoy the experience, I have put videos on it for my daughter (3 years old), pod casts, pictures, and any music that I want.
Two months ago Microsoft changed the details of their Zune Marketplace subscription offereing unlimited downloads for $15 per month. Not too different from Rapsody and the such, however there is a silver lining, you also get to download and keep 10 songs per month which they remove their DRM from. Some music is also in mp3 format. That 10 songs sold me on that subscription and I signed up, and have taken advantage of the service as much as I can. (BTW you can use the service on three PCs and two Zunes) Maybe it is just a ply to increase their numbers, but it worked for me.
Personally I hope they don't can the line. They have some work to do, but it is a solid product, just not as "cool" as an iPod.
You can be "cool" simply by buying a shiny toy with an Apple logo? I guess "cool" isn't what it used to be.
Being cool is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with what you own. You are cool if you are happy with who you are and don't care about what other people think of you. An iPod will not help you achieve that. At the same time, buying something other than an iPod in an attempt to be "different" than the masses will just make you look like a zealot or anti-apple fanboy.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Technically, no the files are not "DRM wrapped" as that would modify the files themselves. Instead, they go into a special folder on the Zune with associated metadata that limits the number of times you can play each song.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I have a brown zune you insensitive clod!
Microsoft won't kill the Zune. Or at least they better not and here is why:
1) They would never be able to sell music again ever... EVER. After play for sure people were cautious to buy another microsoft DRM'ed product. "Fool me once shame on me..." Microsoft wants to sell music through Xbox, through Windows Mobile, through the PC. They want to sell music in the future. Killing the Zune would end that dream. Killing the Zune would end Microsoft's Live Media sales in the in the music department permanantly.
2) They want to integrate it into WM for free. As soon as Windows Mobile has Zune then hit has a decent media player. It's already running a custom Windows Mobile build so it shouldn't be too difficult.
3) The XBox. The XBox is still successful (Profits were up.) Microsoft already sells movies. It's only a matter of time before the music store is available as well.
4) They're in second place! A distant second perhaps. But it's hard to argue to kill a team which has succesfully managed to go from nowhere to second place in only 2 years.
We might not ever see another hardware Zune. But the Zune concept isn't going to die. I think we're going to see Zune follow the classic arc of:
1) Play for sure commodity software.
2) Hardware iPod competitor
3) Commodity software.
Microsoft probably wants to get out of the vertical market competition with Apple. They aren't winning and they can see the writing on the wall as well as apple. The 'music player' is nearing the end of its marketability. It's time to to start fighting over the 'all in one' device. The cell phone.
You put Zune on every Windows Mobile 6.5 device and you've got more Zune Players than iPhones. How is that for a reversal?
I bought it originally because I had a PC and I thought it might work well with MediaPlayer. I was right and I was wrong. Under the first version (I think 9) it worked ok, but once I upgraded to the suggested MP10, it was a huge pain. I think the video was originally a nice feature, but again, DRM made things a pain. I had music I legally owned that it wouldn't play.
Then, of course, accessories were next to impossible to find. Want a rugged rubber case (like my zCover for the iPhone)? Not going to find one (at least not in your first 5 stores you visit). I walked into Fry's, which is a geek supermarket on steroids, and they have one shelf (back then). Now there's maybe a little more, but you'll find two AISLES of stuff for the iPod.
When the iPhone came out, there was finally an iPod killer. Zune made a great try, but it's M$ after all. They had to keep corporate interests. Now my iPod Video sits on the shelf, while I go everywhere with the iPhone. I'm listening to it right now at work.
One last thing killed the Zune for me. "Lock" doesn't. Yeah, I can't change songs, but the unit powers up to show you the lock symbol, which the iPod doesn't do. May not sound like much, but I make a 4 hour ride monthly on my motorcycle. With the Zune in my motorcycle jacket pocket, set to "Locked", the unit would die far before the end of my ride. The unit would get touched, power up, show the "locked" for awhile and then power down. I can make the 8 hour round trip with my iPod and iPhone set with the lock on.