Comments on: Microsoft: Zune sales to top 1 million by June

The music player has slipped from its early perch in the sales charts, but Redmond is still whistling a happy tune.

[daveworld]

Hardly anything to boast about coming from MS

Disney (never knew they had a DAP) is tied with Microsoft at 5th place in market share.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4mxDq8JK89U

Ballmer said:
".......There's a guy who's got a lot of share, and we're coming later in the day...So we have our work cut out."

Least he could do is mention Apple by their name, seeing that they copied Apple's blueprint with this Zune. Their PlayForSome strategy apperently did not work so they went back, studied Apple's game plan (really not much to study - satisfy to consumer) and implement the same game plane. To think, just a few months ago they were saying Apple's closed system will fail, consumers wanted more choice etc ect. Then they release their own closed propriority system, that's more restricted than the iPod+iTunes.

Let's not forget that with every Zune sold, universal gets a cut because we are potential criminals. What did you say, you don't steal music? Universal and Microsoft say otherwise, you criminals.

[brilo]

Losing to Win.

We all know the XBox division absorbed a loss for the first several years of production, sure this was covered in other areas of sales overall, but ultimately that's what it takes to break into a unfamiliar market. They survived on Halo for a while, but have since broken even ground and now are in the black while Sony is playing catch up.

Now the second generation, 360, is cleaning up. Users can't get enough of it and are complaining about not enough games for it (this is a good thing for MS, as it means they're systems are being played). That will come in due time, and it'll be neck and neck with the PS3 (if they ever get their sh*t together).

The Zune is on a similar path. MS is basically saying that our power will keep us in the game here. They're not taking on Apple but yet taking on sales in the portable music arena (which is what most fail to understand). They aim to cut out some similar competitors to gain market share and build a name for themselves; while adding sales and foot traffic.

Will you see the same sales as iPod? Not initially, hell, not for some time but they'll get there.

I look forward to the future of this XBox 360 meets zune meets Media Center land (albeit Linux). It'll happen, just watch the slow but perpetual market share growth turn into sales, downloads, links and overall users.

[mstrhypno]

re: Losing to Win

Not having enough games and relying on HALO to survive works for a game system, but what is the HALO for Zune?

Answer: nothing.

Music is music and people will buy their tunes where they get the best price, best selection and the least DRM blockage and the easiest purchasing method.

Period.

There is no HALO for a music player.

The target IS Apple as there really is no other major player out there, given Apple's massive market share.

Microsoft ALWAYS goes for market dominance and nothing less will EVER satisfy their business model. That means that they have Apple in their crosshairs. Unfortunately, Zune and their sales program FOR it, simply does not have the range, penetration or the impact to do much damage in the short run.

Whether Microsoft will keep it on the market for the long run is debatable.

But given Microsoft's profit-driven past, if this critter doesn't show serious market potential in the first year, I doubt that it will be around for very long.

Only time will tell.

[Penguinisto]

...or just plain losing (*shrug*)

[i]"Users can't get enough of it and are complaining about not
enough games for it (this is a good thing for MS, as it means
they're systems are being played)."[/i]

...and that explains why Burger King is giving away xbox games
w/ a meal purchase, right? (Notice how Sony and Nintendo don't
have to resort to that?)

Incidentally, you mention Halo. Unless a mega-huge band
(ferinstance, [i]Tool[/i],) announces that their next album will
only be released in Zune-only format for download (heh - fat
chance of that ever happening), There is no 'Halo' for Zune.

The rest is marketing blather. Judging by what's getting bought
now, during the biggest time of the year for buying such things,
Zune is sitting firmly in hind-teat position, and fading fast. If
they don't do any better by Christmas (or soon thereafter w/ the
gift card sales), they're screwed this year, and the stain will last
clear into the next two years, barring any miracles in Redmond.

A quick peek at Amazon's ongoing top-100 seller list shows
only one Zune in the pile... the black one, at #67. Meanwhile,
iPods are holding most of the top five slots, and a healthy
majority of the top 20... and that's not just music players, either
-- we're talking cameras and all other electronics equipment
that Amazon sells. On the brick-and-mortar side, Circuit City is
telling the same story with their top-sellers.

Music players are too different from other electronics... there is
no slow climb anymore.

Five years ago, MSFT might've had a chance. Now, they're
looking to share the same fate as the Dell DJ.

/P

[K.P.C.]

It's kinda funny actually . . .

Let's see - The Zune "Debuted" in mid-November and there was
much "Pre-Debute" hype - aka "The iPod Killer".
After the "Debute", Zune seemed to drop out of the radar.

I just did a CNet News search and the last news stories reported
here on the Zune were:
"Gates: Ushering in Zune, spiffing up Office - November 16,
2006".
Preceded by:
"Zune moving at slow tempo - November 14, 2006".
(Those stories came out around <hmmmm> Mid-November
wouldn't you say?)

3 weeks later Zune resufaces on CNet with a total puff piece
headlined:
"Microsoft: Zune sales to top 1 million by June"
Which should of course have read "Microsoft 'expects' Zune sales
to top 1 million by July (or the 'end of' June)" since the word
'expects' was actually included in the 1st sentence of the article
as well as refering to 'the end of June'.

That was just the byline and the 1st sentence.
The fluff doesn't stop there though. Skipping past how "Mr. M$
P.R. Dude" touts thier first days initial sales "ranked <Zune>
near the top of Amazon.com's electronics sales chart.".
Somehow, according to "Mr. M$ P.R. Dude", Zune "now holds
about a 2 percent market share." ? ? ?

I must have missed something there. Could he have meant that,
in that 2 day period, the Zune sold about 2% of the 30GB
players? Does that really equate to them holding about 2%
market share? I think not.

It's amazing what you can do with numbers sometimes. Let's
skip ahead in the article a bit & I'll show you what numbers can
do.

Meet Ms. Kevorkian, an IDC analyst (visions of Jack, aka Dr.
Death, spring to mind). "She expects Microsoft to have sold
about a half-million of the devices by the end of December. As a
point of comparison, research firm IDC forecasts that there will
be 21.5 million hard drive-based music players sold this year,
the vast majority from Apple Computer."

OK, let's look at the numbers of hard drive-based music
playersfor 2006.
21.5 Million sold.
0.5 Million are Zunes.
21 Million are Others
0.5/21=0.0238% (actual market share of HDMPalyers sold)

Then even if you stopped taking statisics at the end of Dec. for
all Other HDMplayers and gave the Zune thier 1 Million
'predicted' by the end of June you end up with:
1 Million Zunes
21 Million Others
1/21=0.0476% (actual market share of HDMPalyers sold)

A VERY far cry from what MS claims would give them "a 10% to
15% share of the market for music players with 30GB or more of
storage". Even when they try to quantify "30GB or more", the
numbers just don't add up.

None of this even takes into account that all of these numbers
leave out every Music Player under 30GB which, by the way, are
the vast majority of them. This means that the Zunes "actual"
market share in "all" MP3 Players will probably reach somewhere
well below 0.001% by the end of June.

The one image that comes to my mind is that, by the end of
June, there might be about a million very lonely people walking
around with brown brick-like Zunes desperately searching for
someone else with a brown brick in thier hands to share thier
music with.

[Llib Setag]

GPS for ZUNIES

ZunieTunes MP3 should have a GPS tracking device built in to help you find another Zunie within a hundred mile radius that you can "squirt one".

Good luck finding other Zunies...Their best feature is a battery monster & totally not going to be used very much.

Dumb idea BaldyBot.

[Sumatra-Bosch]

MSFT Will Be Eaten Alive By the Record Companies

The Zune thing, based on the most paranoid DRM scheme imaginable (payoff to the record labels) and burdened with a thousand tie-in schemes (MSFT lock-in as marketing ga-ga) is about as customer hostile as a car with no breaks that ignites randomly and runs on overpriced, watered-down gas sold by one company - which I guess is a fair analogy to Microsoft Windows.

Sure, great. Microsoft can loan money to orphanages in Africa to buy Zunes and get a million 'sold' by the middle of next year.

What does that do to the fact that most all the reviews for Zune on Amazon (not written by MSFT employees) say the device is the most calamitously malformed consumer electronics product ever assembled? How does that address the fact that every reviewer not directly employed or paid by Microsoft (there's a story to be written about MSFT's astroturfing sites) regards the Zune as a bundle of pathetic attempts to abuse the customer for every last dime and place them more in the thrall of the big media companies than even the old record labels could have ever imagined in their most diabolical dreams?

MSFT won the operating system market by manipulating the manufacturers and getting them to agree to preferentially treat Windows - (the boot loader issue that many old technologists asked Justice to investigate as the most potent and egregious restraint-of-trade behavior exhibited by MSFT and its unindicted coconspirators) - as the default operating system on most all assembled and shippped PCs. (Justice went for the simpler tale - Netscape, the abused billionaire's toy, was supposedly locked out of the Windows desktop. Sniff. It was so horrible, your honor. . . so very horrible. . .)

Culturally, MSFT disdains of actual end users. They are completely beside the point in MSFT's universe. The PC ships with our stuff on it and they have to use it, end of story. Let one tell the boss they want to run Berkeley Unix. Good luck, clownface.

What MSFT will be left doing is throwing more royalties and levy payments to the labels in order to give them the precedents they need to attack Apple for the same fees and break Apple's business model. Again, the user, the technology and the experience are completely out of the picture. MSFT figures once they can bankrupt Apple's business model, they can shovel anything into the void, absorb the losses for years and drive Apple out of the business. The lawyers in Redmond are no doubt laughing themselves sick all over their Porches for dreaming up this scheme. . .

Predictable.

But Microsoft can't force the labels and consumer electronics companies to both accept a technology suite that bottlenecks the hardware and the distribution of content through MSFT technologies the way that the they managed with the operating systems they license to the manufacturers and, oh yeah, the end users.

Consumers can and do go to a lot of different sources for music and there is little that MSFT can do to change that in the downloadable music space except by buying Apple, Real, MP3.com, Emusic, Napster, Buymusic, AudioLunchbox and eClassical. Even if Justice let them buy a new monopoly they'd still be left to deal with the consumer electronics manufacturers who (like Sony and Philips) have their feet in both hardware and content camps and, of course, the record labels, probably the only industry on earth that can claim to have more diabolically ruthless characters than MSFT.

MSFT wins by creating chokepoints and exploiting them to control markets. The downloadable music scene is just too slippery an environment for MSFT to get a foothold and it's populated by monsters that would make the creature in the Alien movies look like Sister Bertrille.

MSFT, however, will not be able to game the labels they way they ultimately screwed over the PC manufacturers (who now complain all profit in the PC goes to MSFT) smaller companies they 'partnered' with (Latest victims: PlaysForSure partners. PlaysForSure? Wow, the lawyers must have lost another expensive lunch after coming up with that name, knowing they'd abandon it - 'Duh! Don'tPlayNow!' - when they were ready to roll their own player) and the competitors (Digital Research, Lotus Development) that they attacked with market-distorting tactics. (The IBM case - which included Lotus products IBM acquired in the claims - was settled last year.)

MSFT enjoys their badboy reputation because the company is chockablock with hyperentitled, imagination-free, chair-throwing screaming child men like Ballmer but not in their most caffeine fueled, post-hoops hallucinatory fugue have they ever imagined the kind of monster they are playing with now. The labels will simply decapitate MSFT with punitively expensive litigation if MSFT gives them the opportunity. After all, the media industry is really one big litigation strategy masquerading as a business model. Before it's all over, it will look like The Flying Nun meets Alien.

Couldn't have happened to nicer guys.

[daveworld]

Thank You - A mouthful but well said

..........

[rmiecznik]

I use BSD Unix

Well, On Mac OS X :- )

I will never again buy a PC, what a piece of SH@#!

I got my G5 Power Mac almost 9 months ago now, and I love
it, no crashes, no freezses, it just works, like in the commercial.

I used to buy PC all the time, not anymore.

Laters : - )