Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Is Zune Out of Tune?


Anyone who dares to compare a Microsoft product to an Apple product risks entering into a religious war about good vs. bad companies, big vs. little guys, quality vs. mass appeal. The details of the products under consideration quickly get lost in the process. Don’t expect things to be any different this time as Microsoft takes on Ipod head-on with the introduction of the Microsoft Zune. Just a quick scan of readers’ comments on the Cnet Zune review page shows the emotion is already high, even though most have not even tried the Zune.


Microsoft’s success on this product will not be based on how cool the player looks or what hardware features it does or doesn’t have. There have been MP3 players available long before IPod and they have come and gone. Some had cooler features well before Apple debuted IPod, but none lasted long. What launched IPod into the high-volume, mass-appeal category was not the product itself, but the content and services that Apple cleverly packaged with IPod, in the form of ITunes. Were it not for ITunes and the legitimized downloadable music business that Apple enabled, IPod would just be a curiosity, heavier, more fragile, more expensive and less versatile than some of the products that came before it. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to recognize that a portable music device needed music and lots of it. And while other companies struggled with proprietary formats and DRM issues, trying to get movie content out for their portable media players (PMPs), Apple went to the television networks and simply expanded its successful music service to TV shows, driving sales of its video Ipod.

If Microsoft is paying attention, it will start playing catch up on content real fast and not worry so much about the software side of things for Zune. Otherwise, the shiny new music player from Microsoft will end up on the pile of unsuccessful PMPs of the past.