C’mon, Lorini, you know, app software, a store infrastructure, a solid public SDK, etc. all take time. I’m sure they could have launched with all of that. In a year or two. At which point, they’d be that much farther behind the technology curve. And even if they did launch with a kickass store design and killer SDK, there are so many freaking apps out there for the Apple it’d look sad and pitiful in comparison, like the Palm Pre store does.
You’re acting like apps and the store are the be-all and end-all of a media player. I’m saying that some people are looking for media players that are media players, not mediocre game machines or smartphones. That’s the market Zune HD is going for.
You’re slamming the Zune HD for not copycatting the iPhone. Zune HD has stuff iPhone doesn’t:
OLED Screen. You have to see video on this. It’s spectacular.
Subscription music. This is a HUGE deal for some of us, and I don’t know many music fans who’ve tried it who don’t find it totally changes how they listen to music, and how much music they listen to. Most people who dismiss it either haven’t tried it, only like a small segment of artists, or are Internet savvy and morally ambiguous enough to steal any music they want.
HD Radio. Radio matters to some of people, not others. Zune’s trying to appeal to those who it does matter to. Apple wouldn’t have added FM if it didn’t matter to a customer segment.
I’m not at ALL saying the Zune HD is a better solution for everyone out there. The Apple App store has some truly fun stuff in it, and some stuff that’s really useful on a phone. (IMHO using a Touch for productivity/Internet stuff sucks unless you live in a magic land of pervasive open Wi-Fi. But that’s just my opinion from owning one since day 1.) There are adapters to plug iPods into everything short of your toaster (which is why I use my old iPod Photo in my car). And there are lots of other reasons some people are better off with iPod Touches than Zune HDs. But the product they built with the Zune HD is pretty damn slick if you’re looking to buy a kickass music/video player, rather than a music/video player/PDA/game machine.
I’m not trying to defend the product because it’s from MS. I’m just trying to explain why I’m going to buy one instead of upgrading to a third-gen iPod Touch, which had been my original plan.
No, I don’t expect MS to have an app store with a zillion titles, but the store itself should have been there. The HD radio is nice, and the subscription service is a good way to differentiate their offering. But we both know that it’s too easy to acquire two million songs without paying a dime. And being locked into paying $15 a month to keep listening to your music is not a slam dunk decision. I haven’t seen the screen, and for me personally that wouldn’t matter much as I value size over quality (haha).
I’m certainly not married to Apple in any way shape or form. I honestly hope that Google’s Android initiative eventually takes off because it’s based on open standards, and that’s the way I want to go. But I just don’t see the Zune being worth the amount of money they are asking for it, and I don’t see it being competitive this holiday season. Right now MS has 2% of this market (like I said, the reviewers are about the only people owning a Zune). Maybe they can double their market share to 4% but who cares?
I almost feel sorry for Best Buy having to devote shelf space to these things. MS must do a much better job on the hardware and what it’s capable of, the software, and the pricing.
If the company can’t help but run 2-4 years behind Apple in media players, why bother competing?
Though of course as the iTouch shows, the vast majority of people are indeed going for mediocre game machines and smartphones.
I know you’re spitting the company line here but it’s silly to compare Zune HD in September 2009 to iPhone OS in June 2007. You should compare it to iPhone in September 2009. It’s clear from those load times that it’s time to upgrade anyway :)
But the product they built with the Zune HD is pretty damn slick if you’re looking to buy a kickass music/video player, rather than a music/video player/PDA/game machine.
So they bred a beatiful horse in a world of automobiles.
Thinking on it it were the DRM restrictions i liked the least. I think it was at least twice, but maybe three times, that i took the Zune on a long business trip only to have the 30day subscription period expire midway through. Having all my music suddenly stop, making the player utterly useless till i sync it back home, is inanely short sighted, like it were intended only to be used on commutes to-and-from work - it never occurred to the designers that having the subscription expire when out of town would ever happen. The worst thing, though, is that there is no way to pre-load the subscription either, i can’t tell it “hey, i’m going out of town so top off the subscription now before i leave”. I guess i could sync it to the work laptop, but being older and less capable, this is a giant pain, because if i don’t copy everything from the Zune to the laptop it will erase everything on the Zune on sync; and there is no directly supported way to copy it all, although it isn’t completely hard to figure out. And that’s not how i like to spend my 10pms after a long business day fussing with an antique and my Zune trying to get them to work together on a hotel Wifi. Barrel of monkeys, it is.
I think you meant that Denny was toe-ing the company line. Or knowing you, I guess the best we can hope for is the hopelessly idiotic “towing the company line.”
Denny, they just need to do better dammit. All consumers want good choices, and MS just isn’t doing a great job. If they were, they’d have more than 2% of the market. Even Sansa is doing better than MS is.
I’m an MS fan. Give me even the slightest compelling reason and I’ll jump ship from Apple, because I find the whole Mac Owner Smugness syndrome to be a major turnoff. I own an Archos for gosh’ sakes, because on paper 2 years ago it seemed to have more going for it (especially storage, but also quality of video playback) than the first-gen Touches. Now that I own a 2G Touch, I have to admit that it clearly blows my Archos 605 out of the water: Internet is 10x faster, music sounds better, interface is a thousand times better, etc. The Archos probably has a nicer video screen (bigger, crisper) and more storage…but it doesn’t have that much better video playback, and the storage thing is an easy tradeoff on the apps.
The apps. You keep dismissing them out of hand as if they are nothing, and that isn’t the case. Yes there are thousands of apps and a great many of them are utter crap. But…then you play a game like UniWar or Spider or Peggle, or you zip through a classic adventure title like Monkey Island, or you easily watch any baseball game live through your Touch that you feel like watching…and you realize what a remarkable device it really is, that there’s not just potential greatness in the apps, but also that said potential is starting to be fully realized by developers.
Let me put it like this: I’m standing here with money to spend. Give me a reason to spend it on a Zune and I’m there next week. I want to give MS money. I just haven’t seen that my money isn’t better spent on a new 64gb Touch, and that’s a huge problem for the Zune HD.
Wait, are they actually planning to do that stuff? Because as I understand it, Windows Phone 7 is their supposedly awesome iPhone competitor, and that’s a different platform(?) than this Zune HD thing. Plus there are all the rumours about Project Pink, whatever the hell that is.
So either Windows Mobile/Phone is the new PlaysForSure that’s going to be killed by the Zune, or Zune is just a dedicated media player that’s not supposed to compete with Windows Mobile/Phone.
Microsoft’s corporate strategy with mobile stuff is just insane, and I assume it’s mostly due to infighting between various fiefdoms.
Nobody outside of MS really knows what they are planning on doing. For a while they said absolutely nothing about the Zune HD as a programmable platform but then they suddenly released Zune HD API extentions for the XNA APIs they already had for the old Zune, so the Zune HD is now programmable by 3rd parties. Of course, without an app store of some kind (even if in a more limited form, like the Xbox Live Indie Games on 360), it isn’t of that much use to end-users or people who want to develop commercial apps.
I suspect they fully intend to make the Zune HD open for app development using XNA for games and a port of Silverlight for non-game apps and they do intend for it to have an app store, and they hope to roll this all out either by the end of this year or early next year. Of course, it would be nice if they were a bit more open with this stuff, they seem to be adopting one of the less desirable Apple-traits (being overly secretive with future roadmap information) when it comes to their PMP division.
If they’d just called the Zune HD the Xbox Portable (or whatever), they’d a) probably have sold a zillion more units, as Xbox is a better brand than Zune, and b) have a much less confusing strategy (game machine vs. all-purpose portable OS). Of course they probably also would have had to get a lot more ducks rowed up to have games launching for the thing and what-not, but even so.
I suspect the Zune is really just a cash-burning project for Microsoft that keeps their engineers happy. Why else wouldn’t they even bother to sell the devices outside of North America? Their massive pile of cash gotta go somewhere since they refuse to pay proper dividends to their shareholders, and not being too successful is actually a good thing lest they acquire yet another monopoly.
I suspect that these are all bridge projects to the eventual Zune Phone + Portable gaming machine.
They know that they need something that can do everything well to succeed in the marketplace…and the only way to get there is to iterate on it while adding new functionality to core. Pretty typical engineering approach to a getting a project like this done honestly.
It wouldn’t be an awful idea to keep Office and Windows in Microsoft proper and just have it be a big, boring, big-dividend paying Utility-like stock. They can spin off the other divisions with a few billion, too.
My favorite part about the Zune - when it can’t sync correctly between computers (whatever that means to the Zune itself, the details are a bit vague to me), not only do i lose the ability to play subscription music, but also music i own and ripped to play on the Zune. Still haven’t figured out a way to undo the DRM breaking all Zune software and reinstalls when i upgraded the CPU…
Anyone still have an old Zune HD lying around? I will buy it off you. I used to have two and would hot-swap them, but I lost one. The one I have left is still going strong, though I have so many podcasts on it, it’s always filled to the brim. It’s nice to tell the Zune software to sync some podcasts to one Zune and others to the second. I still am not aware of a phone app that is as convenient as an offline mp3 player.
I just dredged mine out of the corner it has been sitting in for four years, gave it a full charge and stripped everything off of it. Barring some minor roughing-up of the edge of the metal case (first pic) from a fall onto a concrete driveway nearly a decade ago, it seems functional. Go ahead and PM me if you want to work something out. I’d basically just want to be reimbursed for the shipping costs, since that way at least someone will be getting some mileage out of it.
