MacNight is a blog to humorously extoll the vitues of the Mac and Apple products. Its all in good fun, and please talk it up.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Interesting look at the Zune
There's an interesting interview with Bob Cringely (who used to work at Apple) regarding the Zune. In his case, he thinks the Zune is actually a decoy to its exploits with the XBox. Fascinating.
So the Zune is a decoy. Hmmmm. I don't really believe it. I do agree that MS did not expect to do much to the iPod dominance the first time around. They know that there key product in the consumer market is the Xbox. They will do everything they can to try to find the key link from the Zune to the Xbox to jettison the iPod for the Zune in popularity. They will make the Zune that does everything box. It will play music, and video, and Xbox games, and have a radio, and calendar, and MS office Zune edition, and a phone, and .... All of which work so so on their own but in the end you get so many features for the same price some people will buy into this thinking. Hopefully people will have already experienced the quality of the iPod and will never be able to go back to almost as good. MS can get away with this in computers because they are the market leader. They can wait for Apple to innovate and then just copy them. But with the iPod, they are the leaders and that strategy will not work.
I don't really buy it either, Stitch. In fact, I was quite surprised that someone as travelled as Cringely would have such a bizarre perspective. 500 million is still 500 million, and the shareholders don't want MS or anyone else pissing away that kind of money on a decoy!
2 comments:
So the Zune is a decoy. Hmmmm. I don't really believe it. I do agree that MS did not expect to do much to the iPod dominance the first time around. They know that there key product in the consumer market is the Xbox. They will do everything they can to try to find the key link from the Zune to the Xbox to jettison the iPod for the Zune in popularity. They will make the Zune that does everything box. It will play music, and video, and Xbox games, and have a radio, and calendar, and MS office Zune edition, and a phone, and .... All of which work so so on their own but in the end you get so many features for the same price some people will buy into this thinking. Hopefully people will have already experienced the quality of the iPod and will never be able to go back to almost as good. MS can get away with this in computers because they are the market leader. They can wait for Apple to innovate and then just copy them. But with the iPod, they are the leaders and that strategy will not work.
I don't really buy it either, Stitch. In fact, I was quite surprised that someone as travelled as Cringely would have such a bizarre perspective. 500 million is still 500 million, and the shareholders don't want MS or anyone else pissing away that kind of money on a decoy!
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