Opening Zune Sales Flaccid

An anonymous reader writes "As 'Black Friday' approaches and consumers line up for the Playstation 3 it looks like Zune has become an afterthought. Despite months of hype, opening Zune sales are only so-so. While Zune did reach the top 10 on Amazon's Top 25 list for electronic product sales on its first day, it quickly fell below the top 15 and continues to drop. Six separate iPod models now outsell it as well as SanDisk's e250 player. In-store sales are not much better."

Welcome to the social?

Hello from Seattle. Hello? Anybody here?

Re:Welcome to the social?

If it wasnt for slashdot, i wouldnt even know what a zune is.

Re:Welcome to the social?

To be outsold by iPod is to be expected. To be outsold by Sandisk is a spanking.

Re:Welcome to the social?

The Sandisk has the option of DRM or just using it as a drag and drop drive with no DRM. We use the later and just drag and drop. I didn't even install the Sandisk software until I decided to update the firmware and I've never used the software since then, still drag and drop. It's a simple toggle in the software of the device under USB Options. All I use is MP3 format (192kbps) on the Sandisk, but I know that WMA works and from experience I know that M4a doesn't (iTunes ripping for the nano). I understand that it should work with WMA and the WMA DRM, but never used those. Any other formats are beyond my knowledge or experience.

Sound wise they're both the same to me, I'm no audiophile and I don't think I need to be for this, it's an MP3 player that goes in my pocket. As an everyday user the software on the device is pretty much the same, I'm not going to quibble over the little things. A nice thing on the Sandisk is that a quick press of the power button takes you back to the first screen from where ever you are. The screen is bigger on the Sandisk compared to the nano we have (I don't know if they changed with the last revision). Also the Sandisk has the FM tuner which makes a huge difference down the gym when watch the TV's, the nano doesn't. The sizes are equivalent to me, I don't care about a few millimeters here or there and the Sandisk has an overall better solid feel as it's slightly heavier. However, the controls on the Sandisk are not as good as the nano, the nano definitely wins out there (except for the blue light), but I pick an album and put the thing in my pocket, so tactile control feel is not that important to me. Both require USB charging, unless you pay the cash for the external chargers. The biggest plus to the Sandisk is no software required. As long as I have the cable, in the mode I have it (no-DRM) it acts just like a USB drive with the computer.

All this is just my opinion, based on my preferences for using the two players. Other people will think differently, obviously. Oh, and I've not had any problems with lock-up on either.

Re:Welcome to the social?

"Soon they will be changing it to 'Goodbye from Seattle'"

If you are Matt Jubelirer, product manager for the Zune project, you are probably Sleepless in Seattle right about now.

Re:Did you miss the title?

It's not wrong at all. They're pointing out Microsoft's failure to rise to the occasion in the face of stiff competition.

First pun!

Let's hope this product is zune to be forgotten!

/me ducks barrage of tomatoes

Re:First pun!

That may be, and I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count. If this is their strategy, then bad move Microsoft.

Re:First pun!

"...I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count."

You're kidding, right?

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Ring any bells?

Re:First pun!

True, but that was Taco's first impression. I'd be willing to give h4rm0ny more credit. ;)

Re:First pun!

Why thank you. ;)

To answer the post though, I was talking about the market's first impressions as opposed to mine or Taco's. Quite frankly if the market shared my first impressions, they would achieve the first ever recorded negative sales figures in history. However, the iPod actually did quite well to begin with. There was an initial lag period when it first came out during which it sold moderately well, but then after about eight months it began to rise hugely. Now this could sound reassuring to the Zune lovers (are there any outside Redmond?), but with the iPod, Apple were breaking fairly new ground. MP3 players weren't as prevalent as they are today and nothing quite like the then new iPod was. So that lag time is the technology gathering acceptance, filtering into public awareness, etc. That work is done now and . The Zune is treading old ground and ought to start off with an advantage because of that. But from this story it isn't exactly taking a big chunk of those who are buying their first MP3 player. Furthermore it's trying to break into a very established market whereas the iPod had territory which, if it was fooling around with boys, still had its virginity intact for a little longer. But Jobs has popped that particular cherry and is now in a pretty steady relationship. If the Zune were to steal the girl as it were, it would need to have done better than this.

It has the backing of Microsoft. It probably wont die. But it's not going to be anything amazing and the one good feature it has is crippled with DRM. Others will replicate it soon enough and hopefully in a better way. As phones, PDAs, MP3 players et al., become more and more integrated, there's not going to be a future for an MP3 player that boasts "Hey, I can do wireless."

IMHO, of course. ;)

Re:First pun!

The second-generation zune will come in a new color, Golden Shower, which is sure to be much more popular with fans of watersports. New catchphrase: Do I Hear Rain?

Re:First pun!

Let's hope this product is zune to be forgotten!

"Origami". ;-)

-jcr

Re:First pun!

Opening Zune Sales Flaccid

there goes their chance to penetrate the market.

this product... not so much

I think (just my opinion) with all of the up-front hype and the resulting "flaccid" initial sales figures, Microsoft may have offered up a pretty big loser. Why? Because so much about the Zune and (some of) its features depend on the social network aspect to achieve functionality, and that won't happen with this slow of a ramp.

The flip side, also not good, is that with the slow uptake, the disappointing lack of ability to really use the wireless (because of a dearth of "others") will generate a viral, grassroots word of mouth ripple discourageing potential "others" to buy.

Now slap on the silly DRM, the incompatiblity with almost everything else, the silly purchase plan (float MS a loan anyone?), this product is going nowhere fast. In some ways, too bad, it actually looked to have a certain coolness, but Microsoft forgot and left too heavy a signature...

Maybe the good news out of all of this is the added prompting for makers like Apple to be more aggressive rolling out things like wireless, etc., though it looks to me like Apple has titrated their rollout almost perfectly.

Re:this product... not so much

Listening to music can be social.

Jobs on Zune's sharing feature:

I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Jobs gets this stuff. Think this through. Compare the Bill Gates solution (have people navigate through menus and beam music to other people's players across the room) with what Jobs is proposing. With what Jobs proposes:

1. You've creating physical intimacy through close physical proximity.
2. You're listening to the same song at the same time. It's a shared experience. That isn't necessarily so with the Zune approach.
3. You both have an ear free, so you can actually talk.

Now, there are comments in response to this Jobs quote all over the Internet to the effect of "I don't see the point, you can do the same thing with the Zune." I suspect astroturfing, because the point is obvious: this Zune feature, the only thing is has going for it, is a complicated technological solution to a problem that people have solved in better ways without the technology.

Re:this product... not so much

I agree. The other thing I don't understand is that all of the commercials show the Zune with a "Connecting..." screen. I've seen it about 5 times now and all it makes me think is that this thing takes forever to connect! Not how I want to spend my time. You would think they'd at least have one shot of "Transferring Song..." or somesuch.

Re:That's what happens

-shakes head sadly- They said that when the original XBox was launched. Maybe you're right, mp3 players are a far more saturated market than consoles, and the death of the Dreamcast provided a wonderful stepping-stone with an epitaph engraved on it for them to launch from, but remember: Microsoft HAS and WILL CONTINUE to "crowbar into other markets as the fancy strikes them."
They're just THAT huge.

Coming in at #83

Its Zune, on Amazon's top 100 products
Fantastic work their Microsoft, beaten by even iPod cases and cheap ass dvd players :)

Re:Coming in at #83

Doesn't anyone bother to fact-check before modding a troll "Insightful?" The brown Zune, which trolls are ridiculing without seeing it in person, was at #83 (now #78 (1:15pm PST) [amazon.com]). The black Zune is at #24 [amazon.com].

Yes, Zune sales appear "flaccid," but you don't need to resort to Michael Moore tactics to make your point.

Soooo....

Just goes to show, Apple knows hard and black is the way to go!

Well, I'm sure surprised.

Frankly, I'm amazed that the thing got into the Amazon top ten list at all. I wonder how many units you have to sell in a day to get on that list, and just how many of those units were Evil Empire minions buying one for the team?
-jcr

Re:Zune's Problem IS......Balmer

Then why is the iTunes store so popular?

Re:Not true

Wrong [sourceforge.net], wrong (1 [mactel-linux.org]|2 [apple.com]), and wrong [osx86project.org].

A product no one wanted

It was almost as if Microsoft said "Let's throw millions of dollars at a market and see if we can get a piece of it." The fact that it was trying to enter a market that is already flooded with similar products doesn't help. The fact that the Zune is incompatible with Microsoft's music files doesn't help.

This is not to say that Microsoft should stay out of consumer electronics. The Xbox 360 has a good chance of being the dominant console this generation (outside of Japan). The Zune just happens to be a waste of time and money.

Re:A product no one wanted

This is not to say that Microsoft should stay out of consumer electronics. The Xbox 360 has a good chance of being the dominant console this generation (outside of Japan).

Not if the reviews of the Wii are any indication...

Most Microsoft products suck in first release

This is normal for Microsoft. The first release of a new product never does well. Windows 1 was terrible. Early versions of Excel weren't competitive with Lotus 1-2-3. The original Internet Explorer was lame. It took three years before ".NET" made any sense. Direct-X was terrible in its early versions. The original Xbox worked but was a huge money drain on Microsoft.

Then Microsoft fixes the problem. Each new release gets better. In time, the competition is crushed.

Re:Most Microsoft products suck in first release

Microsoft Money never crushed Quicken
Actually, the story of how the Empire tried to eat Intuit's lunch is quite an interesting one. They pretended they wanted to buy them out, crawled all over the place ostensibly for their "due diligence" for the buyout, and then went off and wrote an app implementing Intuit's product plan for Quicken 4. When Intuit realized they'd been had, they jumped one product generation, and went ahead with what they'd planned to do in Quicken 5. MS Money hit the streets just a couple of months before Quicken got their next version out.

Over the next year or two, MS tried the usual trick of bundling their product with the OS to try to kill Intuit, but that just convinced the customers that MS Money was a throwaway. Also, financial records are something that you REALLY don't want to leave up to a microsoft product. I know accountants who still use Lotus 123 because they don't trust Excel.

-jcr

Re:Just another crappy MP3 player

Of the 14 million people who bought iPods this quarter (150,000 per day), the vast majority of them couldn't care to purchase the FM radio option, don't care about file formats (as long as it plays their existing MP3s), and don't use their iPod as a generic mass storage device.

Although I rarely use it, I agree that the mass storage feature is nice to have when you need it; I can't image how an MP3 player could ship without it.

Some techies seem to waste a lot of time fretting over issues such as file formats, DRM, and technical specs. Meanwhile, everyone else is too busy enjoying their music to give a rats ass.

Flaccid?

You mean Micro and Soft?

More proof there's more to the iPod than marketing

Sure, we all understand nobody likes the king of the hill, no matter if it is deserved or not.

But I hope this helps put to rest the continued notion that iPods only sell so well only because they are a marketing gimmick or some status symbol only to be worn to look 'cool'.

The iPod is, for years now, been a well designed and well executed product. The scroll wheel introduced with the first iPod minis soon appeared on the complete iPod line when everyone including Apple realized it is what seperates it from all the other mp3 player interfaces. Well, it did until Zune and many others tried to imitate it.

The iTunes interface won over many converts from Winamp and Musicmatch Jukebox before they even owned an iPod. Simplicity and power won over again. The iTMS isn't the best selling store by accident.

Sure, the iPod is hyped, but perhaps it is for a good reason. People aren't dropped hundreds of dollars because they're stupid. At least for not this long and for this many years and different iPod models. Has there been a single iPod model that flopped?

MS Marketing "pulled a brown Zune"

The work "Zune" may enter the lexicon as a word akin to Edsel or Pinto.

I heard a guy at work yesterday mentioning Sony's battery recall and commenting they "pulled a brown Zune" in terms of their marketing failure to deal with the problem correctly. (Brown being the least popular color for the Zune).

Think of the uses... "The Republicans got handed a Zune in the last election".

here's the thing...

The really frustrating thing about the Zune is that it is essentially a terrific product. The problem is Microsoft's insistence at putting the interests of vendors first and the interests of their customers a distant second. If they'd only let the damn hardware do all it could do, the thing would be selling like hotcakes. The Zune's wi-fi capability COULD let you share whole playlists, and COULD let you be a DJ and stream to several Zunes simultaneously, and COULD let you share music without wrapping it in arbitrary DRM and COULD let you sync it with a PC without a cable. It could also let you use it as a hard drive and let you sync it with a Mac or a Linux box. But no. Instead, Microsoft's DRM tightassness won't let the Zune be all it could be and what we have now will go down in history as the Bob of music players.

The Zune could have been a hit...

But the handful of other posters are dead-on accurate as to why the Zune is going to fail.

There is already word of mouth that the Zune is encumbered with myriad of limitations. The whole product launch follows a very traditional marketing strategy complete with a flash yet typical advertising campaign. In the days of yore, a company could manufacture hype for a product. Before the internet, word of mouth spready very, very slowly. Now, if you fuck it up -- you're done. Really done.

Who was Microsoft marketing the Zune to exactly? One could only hope that they would have actually done some market research on their target demographic. Enough to know that these people aren't as gullible as they once thought. Clearly, this isn't the case.

The product itself follows the mantra of design-by-deception. Forget all of the stuff about DRM and fair-use. Although that did play a part, the true problem with the Zune is that it was a product manufactured by people who really didn't want it to succeed. The modus operandi of corporations is to build a system to maintain the status quo. We're in a period of time where innovation threatens the life blood of the huge conglomorate. Sure, this threat has always existed -- but not to such a degree as it does today. The unwritten motivation for every decision is to make sure that everything is built to keep things from progressing beyond a company's capacity to adapt. Adaptation brings risk, and nobody in a position of executive privilege truly wants to accept responsibility for a failure, or responsibility for controlling risk. It's PMI training gone haywire.

So, how does this manifest? The Zune is a perfect example. They see the threat coming, they don't want to assume any risk, they design a product to fail and thus hurt the industry where the so-called rising star is coming from, and maintain the status quo.

It's truly brilliant, but this strategy is never laid on paper. It's never communicated. It's simply the ebb and flow of business, which is itself a manifestation of the human being's drive towards power and influence, which is completely derived from human desire for their memory to outlive their physical being due to doubts about the true meaning of life and death.

In an ironic twist, many don't realize that by being a part of the problem, by sacrificing forward progress, they are in fact going against the very nature of man's ambitions. This is, of course, manic. It's probably why we built the bomb, build biological weapons, etc. It's the vain hope that someday somebody actually will make a mistake and wipe us all out, so that some creature down the road might learn from our mistakes and by doing so, we may have a final, romantic sense of redepmtion for our own.

Re:Hurrah! Apple's near-monopoly is secure!

I must have missed all the articles where Steve Jobs attempted to subvert the creation and marketing of Zune and other competing iPod products in order to maintain the near-monopoly and crush the competition. As far as I know, iPod is successful based off it's own merits, and the dancing silhouettes.

The Zune is flaccid?

So I take it nobody's done any squirting yet?

Just needs to be marketed better

case in point: The Pet Rock

Who would buy a Rock for a Pet? yet....it happened.
There is a whole untapped market of gifts that are "not nice". I mean, what do you get someone in the family when you HAVE to get them a present, but you don't like them?

Perhaps they could do a tie-in with those new "LearnAboutCoal.org" commercials and throw Santa in there too.

SANTA: "Well, lets see little Johnny has been very Naughty this year, so he gets a lump of coal!"

Johnny: "Well at least I can burn this and keep warm for a few minutes"

SANTA: "And little Bobby has been especially naughty so he gets a Zune!"

Bobby: "Whaaaa!!!......."

[end tag]: UPS voiceover: "What can Brown do for YOU?"

Design by committee?

Is it just me or does MS seem to design everything by a giant committee, headed up by accountants and market-speak droids?

The seem to be used to dealing with business customers who don't understand computers and don't want or need to -- they just know that MS is the 'best of breed' and MS will take care of their every need. They have no imagination and no ideas of their own about how a computer could solve their problems, or what they want out of it -- they just want to sit down at a training course and have MS tell them how a computer works and what to do with it. They are just there for the ride, eagerly consuming whatever lowest-common-denominator crap MS pumps out.

Meanwhile, the younger kids coming up are computer savy, have a general idea of how computers work and what you can expect out of them, and most importantly what sucks and what doesn't. That's why the iPod has built such a strong brand -- not for its sleek styling, but for its user friendly interface. Instead of another button for another feature, it has *basically* one button (or two buttons, or one nested button) for *all* of its features. This is what the music listeners of today want -- an *easy* way to get to their music. This is worth repeating -- the iPod is simply the easiest path to their music. That's all.

Meanwhile, the MS zune seems to be designed to please music labels and MS' own need for vendor lock-in, with its DRM, shoddy music store, and crappy sharing features. Go ahead, please everyone but the customer who you expect to pay for the privilege of using your crap. Though I must admit, it does work well in the business world.

Amazon customer reviews

Here [amazon.com].

Most of them seem to be very favourable.
First few days is really too early to judge a product sales figures.

How 'bout Ars Technica reviews?

You can't trust amazon.com reviews.

I mostly agree with you on trusting "customer reviews" from online stores, especially if they accept "reviews" from customers who haven't bought the item being reviewed. These Zune "reviews" could turn into a flame war against Apple fans who haven't actually tried the Zune and others trying to counter the effects from fake reviews. See CNET user reviews for a really obnoxious example of this.

However, Ars Technica (an Apple-friendly, but fair site, IMO) gave a pretty positive review for the Zune (7 out of 10) [arstechnica.com], even though they pointed out the early flaws of this product. If you're not familiar with Ars Technica reviews, they are the ones that published some rather infamous iPod reviews where they tested durability by putting an iPod in a washing machine, running it over with a car, and dropping it from a third-story balcony onto concrete (covered on Slashdot [slashdot.org]). BTW, they gave the newest iPod Shuffle 7/10 [arstechnica.com] and the 2nd generation Nano got 8/10 [arstechnica.com].

zune sales

Well, I'd never buy anything with lines like "Welcome to the social" on it anyway. I still have really hard times accepting it as being valid unfunny English with a meaning.

Let's be sensible

I don't get why anybody would buy this when iPods are cheaper for the same capacity.

There's already a considerable ecosystem of accessories and attachments for the iPod.

It works with two open formats... mp3 and aac.

iTunes works with Mac, Windows 2K, XP, and Vista.

Does anybody want to buy this because they can send a song to a friend and he/she can listen to it 3 times. That's it? That's the feature I've gotta have? It doesn't even "Play for Sure!".

Two things...

Despite months of hype

Maybe it's because I own a Tivo, but... what hype? I haven't seen anything on TV, in magazines, on buses, etc.

And regarding the title of this thread, "Opening Zune Sales Flaccid" - do the editors' entire existences revolve around thoughts of sexual inadequacy? That's one of the silliest sentences I've seen put together anywhere. It's pathetic even by Slashdot's juvenile standards.

Re:Who is lining up for the PS3?

This is the most amazing example of an economic boom to bust I've ever seen.

What you have seen is the effect of too many players in a speculative market. Almost nobody pays $3000 for a game console. The rumor of people buying them for $3000 got lots of people excited about easy money and a high mark-up. It's just like the pump and dump stocks. Nothing new here. A few consoles got bought then and sold for $1500 to another investor sucker who thought he could sell it for $3000. Not many paid $1500 to play the console.

A word to the wise, keep out of the specultation market. Very few win at the game.