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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...
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...
everyone misspelled it
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I don't know if it was a factor, but it is deliciously funny, that Microsoft's Zune did not play Microsoft's PlayForSure format. :-)
Really? Because the only phrase in that drivel you just wrote about the zune was wrong "They shipped a Zune that was less feature-filled than the then current iteration iPod." BS! Bigger screen, FM radio, and Wifi. The thing the ipod actually did have that the zune didn't was a shiny surface on the back. That's literallly it. The zune even had better quality audio. Buy music from FM radio? Geat idea.
For the most part the Zune had to do in a few years what Apple did over five. When the Zune was released in 2006, Apple had over five years of experience designing and tweaking the iPod. It also had over three years with iTunes. The whole ecosystem of the iPod also had to be replicated. That was/is no small task. Also the history of Microsoft suggests that they take a few iterations to get things usable.
The first Zune wasn't bad. The problem was it wasn't great. To beat the iPod, it had to be substantially better. It only offered a few features that the iPod didn't (bigger screen, Wi-fi, radio, sharing) but also drawbacks. Shared music is extremrely restricted. Zune can't be used as HD. The more desired advantages were trumped by Apple with the iPod touch which features a new multi-touch interface that the Zune still doesn't have.
One of the main reasons the Zune didn't do as well was marketing. MS just didn't get it that their other products sold well because people didn't have a choice. To convince people to buy your product over another requires good marketing. So they went with "We're the underdog; let's market our product that way and we'll seem cool. Let's make our commercials oblique and obscure." To their dismay, people have never considered MS the underdog or cool. Their commercials never presented the viewer with a clear picture of what they were advertising.
Contrast this with the iPhone commercials. In the smartphone market, the iPhone was/is new. They had to get people to buy it over Windows CE and Blackberrys and non-smart phones. There were four original iPhone commercials. Each of them showed that (1) it's a phone, (2) some other function (Google maps, browser, plays media, etc), (3) how it works using the new touch interface, (4) who makes it (Apple), (5) where to get it (Apple or AT&T). Each iPhone commercial fulfilled the role of advertising whereas the Zune commercials left the viewer puzzled as to what the message was.
In these hard economic times, it doesn't help that the division that Zune is in a division has not been very profitable historically. In the last few quarters has the division been in the black. With the MSN and Xbox (and now the Zune), the division has been $7 billion in losses since the Xbox was started. That can't bode well if MS is so worried about the future that they've laid people off for the first time. The Xbox 360 has many more customers and is more popular than the Zune albeit it probably costs more. Most likely the Zune will have to be cut.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
It may in reality be the largest factor. After the PlaysForSure fiasco, who in their right mind would ever buy ANYTHING with DRM from Microsoft, ever again?
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.
Microsoft uses the point system so you can pay for things over multiple platforms xbox, zune etc.
You know, Cash works for that too.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius