It’s been out for what, six months? I’ve NEVER seen one. Not a single one. I am not acquainted with a single person who owns one. I was in Best Buy last week and they had oodles and scads of shit for your iPod, but I didn’t notice any Zune stuff.
Is it pretty much dead and buried or what? What are its sales numbers? Does it have a future?
Welcome to the crushing loneliness of no social.
I don’t know exact numbers, but I doubt they were ever expected to be high. I think MS said it has exceeded expectations, and growth was good and if you project those rates for 8 years or something it’ll take over the world … I don’t think there’s a future for it.
The model here for Microsoft getting into a market where it’s at the bottom with little to no experience was obviously the Xbox. The first generation is a planned failure (fiscally speaking) but serves to get the name out there by delivering a decent product and something innovative (or at least something not done well yet). The Xbox did it right, with Live and the Media Center bits driving Xbox360 sales. It also helps that the second time around, the other players made more mistakes (Sony is expensive and late, Nintendo has outdated hardware) which makes the Xbox more attractive.
Looking at the Zune, though, this isn’t likely to be the case. They have a decent product, and the great new idea (wireless connectivity) and then they squandered it in the first generation - ‘squirting’ is useless without a user base, and it’s so obviously restricted from what it could do. The additional case of some songs that weren’t even allowed to be shared just made it worse (probably not a lot of songs, but the publicity was terrible).
So their only hope is to get it working the second time. But the one they’re going up against - Apple, of course - is going to beat them. The iPhone will be out Sooner Than We Think, they say; at any rate it will only be a few months. From there, the addition of wireless connectivity done right is inevitable. By the time 2une[sup]*[/sup] is out, you’ll be able to buy songs from the iTS and probably sync with your (or someone else’s) computer. Possibly Apple will get there well ahead of them. Given the lack of support for Microsoft’s music store (the one that only works with Zunes), and the dearth of Zunes to squirt in your neighborhood, there won’t be many people eager to take a chance on them. They also won’t have any more power with the record companies, so there’s little room to get better.
[sup]*[/sup] is a name I made up
I did see a few Zunes today, at Fry’s, but the only person standing near them was looking at the Creative players instead.
I don’t know if it’s dead, but I have yet to see one in the stores.
I must disagree about your opinions about MS. Mail me and I may be able to help you change your mind
What… this isn’t a *public *forum anymore? Dooku, kindly share your thoughts with the rest of us, or please don’t post.
Penny Arcade has an opinion…
They had Zunes at the local collegestudent-computer-store when I asked last month. The resident kings of cool gave them a solid thumbs down and, I think, thought less of me for even asking.
I’ve seen them in Circuit City and Best Buy. The circuit city had a Zune section for accessories. The Ipod Section is much larger of course. The other thing that they don’t have going for them is price. They aren’t cheaper than the Ipod. Everyone I know has an Ipod, to me they are a known factor. I’ve seen other Mp3 players come and go. I’m very familiar with the interface of the Ipod.
If a 30GB Video Zune was $150, I would take a chance, but if the damn thing costs the same as an equivalent Ipod, forget about it.
Share your thoughts with us, Dooku. I’m not seeing a convincing social mass here.
Of course, Zune 2.0 may be a gaming machine that will beat the DS and PSP.
… yeah right.
I live in a funky little desert city and they’re all over the place. Office Depot, Best Buy and our two Gamestops all have prominent displays, and I know a bunch of other stores carry them too. The Zune looks pretty nice, actually, although it’s a bit big for my needs.
At first I was skeptical of the “brown” color, but up close it’s chocotastic.
Has anyone seen them out in the wild? I’ve seen them in stores but I haven’t seen any out in the street.
Don’t do it! He’s one of microsoft’s black operatives. Once he gets your e-mail address, he’ll figure out where you live, and then you’ll dissapear.
I’ve seen them for sale at one of the Best Buys in SF, and at Target in Colma. I was the only soul around.
Hey, if you could strip out the OS so that you could enter/play songs that you ripped from your own CDs indefinately, it might have been awesome. Sadly, it was saddled with a ridiculously authoritarian OS which would shoot any honest user in the foot.
If a company was looking to make a lot of money, they’d come out with an 80 gig MP3 car stereo which will upload songs from any generic MP3 player. Docking stations in the dash are silly, cable interfaces mean your player is constantly falling off the passenger seat, and FM transmitters are hit & miss at best.
Maybe I missed the joke, but Dooku’s e-mail address isn’t public here.
So I would have e-mailed you to ask you post your thoughts, but if I’m not being whooshed, you can probably just do that here. (I’m probably not being whooshed … you do work for Microsoft IIRC, right?)
The big feature of the Zune seems to be the tune-squirting. How useful could that be, really? When we have game events at my bookstore, I listen to the teens arguing about music. They have individual music players because there’s no way three or more could agree on music to play on the store’s system.
You have the top-tenners (any song, no matter how bad, is good when it hits the charts), the anti-populars (any song, no matter how good, is bad when it hits the charts), the era-philes (I only listen to the 2005 punk. This new stuff sucks), the lookies (I love that band - their lead singer looks HOT), the politicos (I never listen to that band. The bass player said something nice about a politician I hate), the narrow-genre narrow-minds (I only listen to socially-responsible blues crossover from Chicago bands without female vocalists), and so forth.
Seriously, how likely is their major target market to like the same music as the dude sitting behind them on the bus?
Maybe Dooku was hoping the judgement in the patent case between Microsoft and Alcotel/Lucent would go the other way…
{Big post deleted}
Um…yeah. I was ordered in no uncertain terms to not say one word about any of this, and of course that includes the Lucent thing.
Sometimes I effin’ hate this place. I can say that, eh Comrades? Eh? Eh?
I think the Zune could have been more of an initial success if they could have beaten Apple in something… anything. But they didn’t. I get the impression that they were resigned to failure and just wanted to get over the hump to the Zune2. They could have:
Made it cheaper than an equivalent iPod. Nope.
Made it use the “PlaysForSure” DRM stuff so it’d work with all the music stores (except iTunes). Nope
Innovated the interface, maybe with a touchscreen. Nope.
Instead all we got was “Squirting,” a function so useless not even the fanniest of fanboys can justify its existence.
Dooku, why bother posting if you can’t say anything? Your messages about how you can’t post aren’t particularly compelling reading.
I thought this was the funniest thing about the Zune, because it really sums up Microsoft’s problems. They release a DRM scheme called PlaysForSure, let it gain traction in the market for a while, and then they release a music player on which PlaysForSure music…doesn’t play.