Opening Zune Sales Flaccid 451
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome to the social? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seattle is fine with lots of people, traffic jam problems, beautiful countryside, the sound, etc. A short ways East in Redmond might be a diffrent story.
More seriously, Yet another incompatible lower feature format.. Get a clue. Trading very restrictive DRM in another incompatible format for a taste of Wi-Fi is not a selling point.
The only selling point for middle school kids is there is no DRM on photos. They can be transfered wirelessly. This is the hot new wa
Re:Welcome to the social? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's an MP3 player. It also supports the MS Plays for Sure format, but that is a seldom used feature.
Re:Welcome to the social? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
FM tuner on the ipod (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Welcome to the social? (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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Redomond's flaccid sales have thus far failed to prick a hole in the stiff market-share erected by those Cupertino pricks.
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First pun! (Score:5, Funny)
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Low sales, if anything, give Microsoft a chance to work out Zune Marketplace bugs, while treating the paying public like beta testers, which is their style. Higher sales would just mean the possibility of more angry customers during th
Re:First pun! (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're kidding, right?
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Ring any bells?
Re:First pun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:First pun! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Believe me, if there are problems, we'll hear about them regardless of how many people buy in.
Re:First pun! (Score:5, Funny)
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And low sales aren't good for Microsoft, either. The whole wifi sharing thing relies on a critical mass of devices out there, otherwise it's useless. Without the wifi sharing the Zune is just a limited, re-badged, Samsung MP3 player.
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No one knows what (if any) firmware updates will happen, so it's best to judge hardware by what it can d now, rather than it's potential
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Their being a monopoly elsewhere has very little direct impact on this product, just like it has very little direct impact on the Xbox 360 or on MS' hardware business. (Are they still doing that?) All their monopoly (and busines in general) does is FUND these ventures. Any other large company could do the same thing- Sony, for
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Re:First pun! (Score:5, Funny)
there goes their chance to penetrate the market.
this product... not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I would wager it has less to do with units sold (though it can't help) and more to do with the fact that people don't listen to music to be social. They do it so they can ignore people.
Apple tries this tactic too in some of their ads, and I don't see how they expect it to work. If you want people to socialize, they need to DO something togethe
Re:this product... not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Listening to music can be social.
Jobs on Zune's sharing feature: 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:- You've creating physical intimacy through close physical proximity.
- 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.
- 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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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I love the way he understands that making a gadget that sells is nothing to do with tech but instead all about pulling the ladies.
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Like Phil Collins, for example?
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This is a totally different market - the music consumer. As far as "compatibility" goes, Microsoft has no advantage, because the iPod and iTunes is what you need to be compatible with. Basically
Coming in at #83 (Score:5, Insightful)
Fantastic work their Microsoft, beaten by even iPod cases and cheap ass dvd players
Re:Coming in at #83 (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, Zune sales appear "flaccid," but you don't need to resort to Michael Moore tactics to make your point.
Soooo.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Same problem with this sales list as any other one (such as sold music albums)... it doesn't really say much about popularity unless you have the actual hard numbers and how those numbers compare to the rest of the year (and perhaps same period previous year). Let's see where it la
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A product no one wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if the reviews of the Wii are any indication...
Most Microsoft products suck in first release (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Just another crappy MP3 player (Score:2, Insightful)
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not without a $49 radio remote.
Shhhh, Nobody Tell Him... (Score:2)
Re:Just another crappy MP3 player (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yes, I know iPods use USB. But they require a dock and aren't mass storage devices out of the box.
They don't require a dock, but they do require a cable with a dock adaptor at one end (the dock connector has USB pins, among other things). Third party manufacturers also produce adaptors, and the pin-outs of the dock connector are available if you want to create your own.
They also can't be connected to other USB storage devices for file transfers.
They show up as mass storage devices on any computer t
Flaccid? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft and hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
Exhibit 1: PocketPC. It flopped twice before taking off, and by then, it was too late, because the PDA was already a sinking star and most people needing the functionality bought smartphones instead. There was no way that a HUGE and clumsy PocketPC device of ~year2000 was going to compete with the dapper Palm V/Vx, and it didn't. Too big, too mediocre, too la
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The number on how much each division makes can be found in their 10-K report that they file with the SEC. Filings are available at www.sec.gov.
Don't forget the XBox (Score:2)
Origami? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Battle Hymn of the Republic, re-updated (Score:2, Funny)
It is trampling out the storage where the Costless Tunes are store'd,
It hath loosed the flaccid lighting of its terrible short release;
Its songs are marching out.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Its songs are marching out!
I have seen it in the watch-fires of a hundred wary bands!
They have builded it an altar in the circling doom and damp;
I can read its righteous screen by the dim and flaring lamps
More proof there's more to the iPod than marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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" (Score:4, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hate how virtually every tech company bends over backwards for the entertainment industry. No one company, except for Apple, has stood
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Dude, it's fucking brown.
The Zune could have been a hit... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The Zune was set-up to fail -- in order to sabotage future market demand for a similarly-featured product?
**AND** this strategy is part of the Circle of Life and the eternal struggle of Man?
The Zune is flaccid? (Score:5, Funny)
Between the title and company name (Score:2, Funny)
Just needs to be marketed better (Score:4, Funny)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be sensible (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Funny)
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:Zune's Problem IS......Balmer (Score:4, Interesting)
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Define popular. You need a point of comparison, i.e. how well it would be doing if it didn't lock people in. It might have ten times the sales figures without the crappy DRM.
iTunes Music Store only looks like a lock in. (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'll buy from itunes when I can download lossless and burn to cd. Still when that day comes why bother with the DRM?
I'll keep on ripping my cd's in flac and using my IAudio to play them thanks.
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Joe Six-Pack doesn't see iTunes' DRM getting in his way. In fact, the only time he notices it is when he types in his password (once in a blue moon), to get another computer authorized on his iTunes account. He doesn't notice the compression artifacts; he doesn't even know what "lossy" means.
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For a self-confessed Apple fanboi, you seem to have gone out of your way to deliberately misrepresent Apple on this one. Let's clear this up for you - Apple has added a feature! Prior to this update you couldn't pull any songs off the iPod onto another computer without third
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There have been 28 different models of iPod, excluding different colors. The mean capacity of the iPod given those models is just under 18.5 gigabytes. Apple's marketing materials consider 1 gigabyte to hold 250 songs; therefore, the "average" iPod holds 4,625 songs.
Sorry, but 22 songs per iPod just doesn't strike me as a runaway success. I'm proof that the D
Not true (Score:3, Insightful)
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No, they don't. As a matter of fact, most people have plain old MP3s on their iPods.
Re:Not true (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't forget Winamp, Ephpod, GNUpod, and others
The one OS that you can run on your Apple box? OSX
Also Linux, BSD, and Windows*
*Requires Intel Mac
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Re:That's what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
They're just THAT huge.
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This is true. However, I think this will eventually lead to Microsoft being several unique companies using the same name.
I don't think Zune will fail enough to warrant it from being pulled from the shelves and the developers exiled to Ebonia, but its not going to dominate the market.
Consider the demand for the Wii and PS3 over the Xbox360.
The Xbox360 isn't a failure, but isn't a mind blowing success when compared to it
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Re:Who is lining up for the PS3? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Huh ... hello? (Score:2)
That the price has dropped on ebay is great news, it's stupid to buy this console at such ridiculous prices (including the 1200 you listed there, it's just stupid)
Re:Hurrah! Apple's near-monopoly is secure! (Score:4, Interesting)