Zune Business Dev Executive Moves On 125
An anonymous reader slipped us a link to the Seattle PI article discussing Bryan Lee's departure from Microsoft. The former business development VP for the Zune has parted ways with the company for personal reasons now that 'Zune was launched and on track'. This means that J. Allard will be stepping up into fill the void. Allard was instrumental in bringing the first Xbox console to market, and was the VP in charge of technical matters for the Zune. An analyst with Gartner is quoted as saying this move means not all is well in the land of Zune, but a rumour on the CrunchGear site indicates that Microsoft is planning on stepping things up later this year with a Zune cellphone. A smartphone designed to compete with Apple in that market it would seem, despite whatever problems may be going on, the company is still rather fond of the strange little brown device.
Re:On track all right... (Score:5, Informative)
Btw, for those of your unfamiliar with American business, leaving "for personal reasons" is code for "We're dumping you, you miserable failure, but we'll sugarcoat it to salvage your dignity."
Usually that's the case, but sometimes it refers to a a situation in which the person leaving is so fed up with the organization that they simply must either leave in order to preserve their sanity. The company then uses the normal incantation to the press, to make it seem as though the person leaving was the failure, rather than the execs to whom he reported. I'm not saying that's the case here, but there's usually a lot more going on with these things than meets the eye.
What would save the Zune (Score:2, Informative)
Think of the slobbering that would go on around here if you could easily use its wireless transfer on an open player.
One accidental "leak", and you know people would buy the heck out of these things.
Re:Zune cellphone? (Score:3, Informative)
Conglomerates? MS is nothing compared to conglomerates with disparate businesses. look at the Hyundai, Samsung, Siemens, BASF, 3M, Misubishi, Hitachi chæbol/keiretsu and where they have their grubby hands in.. their tenatcles ^Whands are not virtually in everything they really are in everything from software, snacks, cars, machinery, computers, 3C electronics, etc.
Compared to those and the likes of GE and such, MS is merely tip-toeing beyond it core business.
I mean, remember where HP was? Printers, computers, calculators, hard drives, scientific equipment, toner, CPU design, OS development, etc....MS has little on them...
Applications on a Wireless phone [Crunch Gear] (Score:4, Informative)
Link to the Article on CrunchGear [crunchgear.com].
Its interesting to see that Microsoft was thinking about this a few years ago long before Apple announced their I-phone.
Re:On track all right... (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect. MS's entertainment division (which includes both the Xbox and Zune, but not much more than that) lost $277 million in the most recently announced quarter, which was through December 2006. It lost $275 million in the same quarter last year, so this is not even an improvement, much less a turn from losing money to making money.
No doubt the Zune dragged on those numbers a bit, but it's not nearly as costly of a product as the 360. The 360 should be subsidizing the Zune at this point, and it clearly isn't. The entire entertainment division is still being subsidized by Office and Windows. MS has lost billions on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and will probably never make that investment back.
Re:On track all right... (Score:3, Informative)
Also see here [blogspot.com], in case you don't want to take my word for the $4B number.
Re:Believe it or not.. (Score:3, Informative)
Also if the phone is up to my ear why do I care about the buttons being displayed? Sure the screen real estate is useful for movies or whatever. I'm sure its much more intuitive for a PDA. The problem is that I, as well as many others, want our phone to perform as a phone before anything else.