ShareThisBy JAMES DERK
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Five years after the launch of Apple's Ipod, which rebuilt the online music industry by itself, Microsoft now has released "Zune."
Like many Microsoft attempts to copy Apple, this one is too little, too late and too big.
At a time when Apple is releasing smaller and smaller music players with more storage, Microsoft has released a 30 GB brick when compared to the current players from Apple and even a few others.
While Apple is moving to chip-based storage, Microsoft remains with a small hard disk, which undoubtedly will reduce battery time. There's no TV or movie video with the Zune yet; heck it won't even do podcasting. And at $250 it isn't even cheaper than an Ipod.
"The Zune doesn't offer enough compelling features to really differentiate itself from iPod," Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research, told the AP. "It's not good enough to get people off their iPod addiction. At the end of the day, there's no cachet to owning a Zune."
And that is what Microsoft is missing. Part of the attraction of owning a good Ipod is the lifestyle choice. It's like a Tivo; people who own one just nod at each other like, "Yup, you get it."
I don't see that happening with the Zune because there's nothing hip about Microsoft hardware (aside from mice.) There's no rabid group of fans out there, no huge base of installed promoters like Apple has.
With a market share approaching 70 percent, Apple sits high on the mountain. The question is, can Microsoft topple the king?
The player itself is thicker than the comparable Ipod. It has a nice user interface that users will get used to pretty immediately. When it comes to what it does better than Apple, it does feature a built-in FM tuner and wireless music sharing among other nearby Zunes. (You can listen to a shared song only three times in three days before you have to purchase it.)
The wireless feature, if ever expanded upon, could be interesting. Could one eventually purchase music wirelessly? Could you log into the Zune music store and download a song without wires? That would be something to slap Apple but it's not out there yet.
Microsoft's new music store will offer two music models; a rental plan ($15 a month and your songs work as long as you still pay up) or 99 cents a song, same as Apple. (The former plan is for those who lease cars; it's a pretty bad deal overall.)
What Microsoft needs to do is what it did with the Xbox; cut the price and lose money on every one. (For a while, and maybe today, Microsoft lost $150 or so on every Xbox sold because they eventually would make up the profit on games.) The trouble with my theory is that Microsoft doesn't have any skin in the software side (i.e. the songs) so cutting price to gain market share could backfire as well.
It's shame this was not a horserace earlier.
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